Latest news with #Africana
Deccan Herald
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Talking black excellence over cocktails inside the Met Gala
The show was guest curated by Monica L Miller, chair of the Africana studies department at Barnard College, whose 2009 book inspired the collection.
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Talking Black Excellence Over Cocktails Inside the Met Gala
The Met Gala's themes can sometimes be vague, but this year, the Costume Institute benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art got far more specific. The night was a celebration of 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,' a new exhibition focusing on the Black dandy and its influence on fashion. The show was guest curated by Monica L. Miller, chair of the Africana studies department at Barnard College, whose 2009 book inspired the collection. At a cocktail party to toast the opening, the stars sported their best take on the Black dandy or, in Kim Kardashian's case, a quaintrelle. 'I'm not sure how to pronounce it,' Ms. Kardashian said of the term, meaning a woman who uses personal style to emphasize a life of passion, as she walked into the Great Hall of the Met. 'I had a vision of a modern-day dandy like Lenny Kravitz, and so that's who I was inspired by with Chrome Hearts.' This year's exhibition was sponsored by Instagram, Louis Vuitton and Tyler Perry, among others. The honorary chair of the event was the basketball star LeBron James, who said he was unable to attend because of a knee injury. His wife, Savannah, came in his stead. 'I am supporting my husband here on behalf of him,' Ms. James said. 'But if there is any Met Ball that I would love to be a part of, it is this one. This is more than I could have imagined.' As guests walked into the museum they were greeted by more than 7,000 faux narcissus flowers suspended in the air. And as they walked up the stairs, they were received by a decorated group of co-chairs that included the Oscar nominee Colman Domingo, the rapper ASAP Rocky, the Formula 1 racecar driver Lewis Hamilton and Pharrell Williams, Louis Vuitton men's creative director. That group, save for ASAP Rocky, stood at the top of the stairs alongside Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and the global editorial director of Condé Nast, who has been orchestrating the Met Gala since 1999. For some of the guests, this year's gala was particularly special. 'This one is just steeped in meaning,' said the tennis great Venus Williams. 'You can see by what everyone wore, how much thought they put into it, also how much it meant to them and how much they wanted to get it right.' She added: 'No matter what is happening in your life, no matter what barriers you're facing, no matter what freedoms you have or don't have, you can still express yourself, through what you wear, and still be powerful.' The history of the Black dandy goes back to when some enslaved people were forced to dress in an elevated style. Black people later embraced that style to reflect their social mobility and their aspirational freedom. The style is about self-expression in incredible detail, which was reflected in many of the stars at this year's gala. 'I am woman dandyism,' the rapper Megan Thee Stallion said during cocktails while wearing a sparkly Michael Kors number. 'I'm giving Josephine Baker, a little Eartha Kitt.' Fresh off an Oscar win, Zoe Saldaña was dressed in a Thom Browne gown as she sat next to her fellow actress Kerry Washington in the American Wing of the museum. Everyone who walked into the area stopped to greet them, including the actresses Demi Moore and Ayo Edebiri. Dandyism and Black excellence are not things to be celebrated only on occasion, Ms. Saldaña said. 'We celebrate every day when we wake up and while we're sleeping.' Dandyism can also reflect refined and elegant personal style, which was embraced by luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance like Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. That style of dress empowered Black people and allowed them to assert their dignity. 'We have always been here,' said the Grammy-winning rapper Doechii, who was wearing custom Louis Vuitton men's wear. 'I've always been here. What I represent for fashion and dandyism right now has always been here. It means everything to me. It means history and representing the dandies that came before me.' The stylist Law Roach had predicted days before that it would be the Blackest gala in the history of the event, which was by design. Joining the co-chairs was a host committee of 25 Black celebrities that included Ms. Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris, Janelle Monáe, André 3000, Regina King and Spike Lee 'It's looking pretty much like what I said,' Mr. Roach said as he walked in to the gala decked out in Burberry. 'I think it's important for us to be celebrated for the contributions that we've made,' he added. 'Decade after decade, century after century, that not only affects culture, but pop culture and fashion and everything else.' As Miley Cyrus, Sabrina Carpenter and Jeremy O. Harris chatted near the back of the American Wing, Edward Enninful shouted into his cellphone behind the bar. Gigi Hadid laughed with Derek Blasberg not too far away. At another bar in the wing, Future chatted up FKA twigs while Mr. Williams and Ms. Wintour continued to hold court nearby. As Jeff Goldblum made his way inside the wing, castmates from HBO's 'Euphoria' — including Zendaya, Hunter Schafer and Sydney Sweeney — hugged and hung around. The Costume Institute and Vogue had been working on this year's theme for several years before it all finally came to life. The starry celebration of the Black dandy was held a month after President Trump signed an executive order titled 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.' In the order, Mr. Trump took aim at the Smithsonian Institution for coming 'under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.' Among guests at the 2025 Met Gala, however, the idea of celebrating the Black dandy didn't seem particularly divisive. 'This is, like, the total opposite of what's happening in the country today,' the director Spike Lee said, wearing Fear of God and checking the score of the Knicks game. 'You see all these artists, business people, successful Black folks, it is vibrant,' Mr. Lee added. 'Everybody's getting love, everybody's giving love.' The theme coming to fruition at this specific time was not lost on the producer and songwriter Babyface, who nursed a drink while wearing a black and white Laquan Smith ensemble. 'There has always been flavor,' he said. 'So being able to embrace that tonight and the timing tonight with what's going on in our country right now, it couldn't be better. I feel very honored that they saw to it.' Well after the cocktails were over, as a choir set up in the Great Hall to serenade guests as they departed for dinner in the Temple of Dendur, Rihanna finally made her way up the steps. As is often the case, she was the last guest to arrive. 'Dandyism is excitement, reinterpretation,' she said as she rushed into the event, somehow donning a corset over a freshly revealed baby bump. 'It is all the things I love about Black people, how we just take things in and make it our own and make it something that is covetable.'
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Met exhibition review: show-stopping peacockery and introspective origins
For its spring 2025 exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute gave itself a monumental challenge: to use fashion as a means of exploring the complexities and contradictions of Black life. More specifically, to use the expressive style known as dandyism to explore the nuances of Black masculinity. The show, called Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, which opens on 10 May, attempts to do just that – and mostly succeeds. It was inspired, in part, by the death of Vogue's beloved fashion editor André Leon Talley in January 2022. Talley was known in the industry for his larger-than-life personality and penchant for flamboyant luxury ensembles (capes! Louis Vuitton tennis racquets!), a combination which helped him become Vogue's first Black creative director. In many ways, he is the very manifestation of Black dandyism, which the show describes as a person who, 'studies above everything else to dress elegantly and fashionably'. But the show is not just about Black men with a surfeit of personal style – though there are many examples of just that in it – but also an examination of how they, from the 18th century to today, have leveraged clothing as a vehicle of self-expression, agency, personhood and more. At its best, it's that tension, between show-stopping peacockery and the introspective origins that gives this ambitious show its more potent frisson. The exhibition was inspired by the 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by Monica L Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College who serves as guest curator of the exhibition alongside the Costume Institute's head curator Andrew Bolton. At a private view on Monday morning, Bolton laid out how Miller's book served as the exhibition's foundation: 'Black dandyism,' he said, 'is both an anesthetic and a political phenomenon. [It's] a concept that's just as much an idea as an identity.' 'We all get dressed,' said Miller in an interview at the museum, just hours before the splashy Met Gala was scheduled to commence, explaining why fashion is such a powerful way to explore the Black experience. 'When we think about Dandyism as a strategy and a tool for negotiating identity, I do think that's something that everybody understands.' The show presents more than 200 items – clothing as well as accessories, paintings, photographs and other ephemera – spread across 12 thematic sections which include Respectability, Disguise, Cool, Beauty, Heritage and more. In many ways, the opening ensemble, a resplendent uniform belonging to an unnamed slave from circa 1840, made from purple velvet and edged in gold galoon, distills the show into a single garment. That its enslaved wearer was not a dandy of his own accord, but an object that belonged to another speaks to the history the exhibition explores. The rest of the show seeks to demonstrate how, from those seeds, Black men used fashion to reclaim their autonomy and assert themselves in culture. Alongside the historical items are recent examples from contemporary designers of color, such as Grace Wales Bonner, Olivier Rousteing of Balmain, and Pharrell Williams of Louis Vuitton (Louis Vuitton is a sponsor of the event and Williams is a co-chair). Much like Talley, another ghost hovers over the show: that of the designer Virgil Abloh, of the brand Off-White and later Louis Vuitton, who died in December 2021, a transformative figure in the fashion world. At various turns the show can be a history lesson, an appreciation, a cultural critique, or a reclamation of Black designers who have been sidelined from larger fashion conversations. It also addresses how Black dandyism intersects with sexuality and gender, among many other ideas. As Miller said: 'The goal was to design an exhibition with many entry points.' If anything, it can sometimes feel that the show chose too much ground to cover, and the way in which the exhibition is laid out can, at times, be confusing. Still, it's a bold and modern move from a storied institution, and one that its staff clearly took seriously and handled with sensitivity. 'I think our entire audience will see a complex, fascinating, powerful story and history of Black sartorial style and of the idea of the dandy and how that had this almost projection throughout history,' said Max Hollein, the Metropolitan Museum's CEO and director. 'You will learn about Black history, you will learn about the ways that history has unfolded.' Take the staid tailoring from the section dedicated to respectability, which are beautiful but equally emblems of how Black men used traditional suiting to signal to outsiders that they were deserving of consideration. Contrast that, then, with the swaggering work of Dapper Dan, a Harlem-based designer who took luxury goods from Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Fendi and other brands, and remade them in casual styles that appealed directly to Black tastes. There are many such examples throughout the show. Like the pieces that Miller says best encompasses her vision of the show: a tailcoat, top hat, cane and pair of sunglasses, once owned and worn by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. 'You understand that for Douglass, dressing in a particular way was part of his job and part of his strategy of representing Black people to the world and arguing for the achievement, and the maintenance of civil and human rights,' she said. 'But those sunglasses show that he had a sense of style, one that was his.'
The Star
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
An early look at the Met Gala fashion exhibition exploring Black dandyism
Monica Miller in a back room of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum. She offers a sneak peek at the fashion exhibition exploring the influence of the Black dandy. Photo: The New York Times In the glare of camera flashes on the first Monday in May, it's easy to forget that the Met Gala isn't just an expensive-looking celebrity parade – it's also the opening celebration for a museum show. This year, the party will inaugurate 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style", an exhibition put on by the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute that traces the influence of the Black dandy over 300 years. The exhibition investigates how dandyism, a style of elevated dress once imposed upon enslaved people, was remade by Black aesthetes into a tool of social mobility and self-definition. It might take the form of a tweedy three-piece suit, a disco-fabulous stage costume or a slouchy leather jacket printed with luxury logos. Those pieces and more than 200 others in the exhibition illustrate how Black dandies have wielded their clothing as instruments of both flair and function. Read more: 'From Savile Row to track suits': What to expect at this year's Met Gala 'Dandyism is a practice that's not just about clothing, dress, accessories,' said Monica L Miller, the guest curator of the exhibition and a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College. 'It's often about the strategic use of those things in particular political moments, around particular cultural nodes.' Miller, whose 2009 book, Slaves To Fashion: Black Dandyism And The Styling Of Black Diasporic Identity , inspired the exhibition, scoured historical societies, museums and private collections to find pieces that located Black dandyism at turning points in history. – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The Star
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
'Dandyism is a discipline': One man's take on style, identity and defying labels
Ike Ude will tell you that he is not a dandy, and that he wonders why Americans are so keen to categorise people. 'I don't think I should elect to call myself anything,' he said. If pressed, though, the elegant Ude, a New York artist born in Nigeria, will acknowledge that 'dandyism is a discipline', one that he does practice, even while refusing any label. Yet dandyism is all about refusal – of fixed identities, of mediocrity, of gender conventions, of the boundary between life and art. Dandyism blends literary and artistic creation with the art of personality, the careful cultivation of image and behaviour – all of which applies to Ude's practice. Ude, 60, has long enjoyed a reputation as a preeminent dandyist artist; in fact, his portrait appears on the cover of Slaves To Fashion: Black Dandyism And The Styling Of Black Diasporic Identity , the landmark 2009 study by Monica L Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College. Read more: 'From Savile Row to track suits': What to expect at this year's Met Gala The artist, who served as a special consultant on a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition on Black dandyism, understands the power of rejecting labels. Photo: The New York Times This season, Black dandyism – and Ude – are very much in the conversation. Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, invited Miller to help organise this spring's exhibition, 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style', which was inspired by her book. Ude served as a special consultant to the exhibition, a work of his appears in the show, and he also provided the catalogue's epilogue, written partly in dandyist aphorisms. He was also tapped to photograph a related cover story for Vogue 's May issue, a profile of actor and producer Colman Domingo, who is a co-chair of this year's Met Gala. Many tend to associate dandyism with white, European aesthetes of earlier centuries – men like Beau Brummell, Lord Byron, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde – who often produced art or literature, but also produced themselves : making social waves not by dint of noble birth, but through their carefully constructed personas, ironic wit and impeccable dress. Although less recognised, Black dandyism also dates to the 18th century, when, as Miller writes in her book: 'The Atlantic slave trade and the rise of a culture of consumption created a vogue in dandified Black servants.' But over time, she explains in a video announcing the exhibition, dandyism 'gave Black men and women an opportunity to use clothing, gesture, irony and wit to transform their identities'. At his Chelsea apartment and studio, Ude greeted me in one of his signature looks: pale khaki Bermuda shorts; vintage white oxfords; a fitted beige cotton blazer, discreetly striped in black and red; a crisp white shirt; and a silk neckerchief in chartreuse, black and red. As ever, Ude's hair rose in two hemispheres of springy curls, parted in the middle, giving the effect of a bifurcated crown. The space is at once spare and densely appointed, with minimal furniture and little evidence of food preparation, but abundant books (covering art, architecture, fashion and centuries of literature) as well as art, figurines and decorative objects of all kinds. A plastic model of a human heart sits on a shelf. Japanese dolls, dressed in tiny, exquisite kimonos, strike graceful poses. 'I love their sartorial fireworks,' Ude said. Ude's art is as densely alive as his home. He is renowned for his meticulously composed, colour-saturated theatrical photographic portraits of himself and others. 'Self-portraits' may not be quite the right term for those pictures featuring Ude, though, since he is not depicting 'himself'. Instead, he portrays a world of diverse, elaborately costumed characters, posed in complex, faintly surrealist tableaux, in visual conversation with curious objects (often added digitally): a gramophone, a butterfly net, even a bird sporting an expression as wryly self-composed as Ude's. Portraits of others pack similar visual punch, each subject presented as if the ruler of a miniature kingdom, styled sumptuously by Ude (after an 'intense Zoom session' during which he studies their look and personality), faces lit to heighten their sculptural drama. 'I just love seeing people beautiful,' he said. His ambitious 2016 series, 'Nollywood Portraits', consisted of 64 images of actors and directors working in the exploding Nigerian film industry, all vibrating in glowing jewel tones. Ude's current project, 'Amazing Graces: Portraits Of Eminent African American Women', is similarly ambitious, featuring 64 portraits of notable Black women with accomplishments in the worlds of business, philanthropy, the arts, politics and academia. The impetus? 'As a group, African American women are not terribly well represented aesthetically,' Ude said. 'When they're represented, in cinema, for example, it's a bit crude. They are like double minorities. Look at the role of African American women in Gone With The Wind .' With the series, he aims to 'establish an artistic and aesthetic standard that future generations can reference and use as a point of departure'. Read more: Met Gala 101: What to know about 'fashion's biggest night out' this year Famous figures already photographed in this lineup include actress Phylicia Rashad; her sister, choreographer, actress and director Debbie Allen; and diplomat Susan E Rice. Ude said that the series also represented 'a debt' to his mother, who died at just 54, pausing to show me an old photograph of a lovely woman in a 1950s-style taffeta dress. For Domingo's Vogue cover, Ude transformed the actor into a kind of dandy-cavalry officer, posed against an intensely crimson background, one hand on his hip. He wears slim-fitting red trousers and a cropped, double-breasted, black military-style jacket lined with gold buttons (both from Balmain), adorned with a Chanel brooch resembling a war medal. In one hand, Domingo clutches a pair of red kid gloves. In the other, instead of a sword or a riding crop, he holds a wilting red and yellow peony. 'I wanted to portray Colman as a contemporary version of a gentleman of a past epoch,' Ude said. Dandyism is about precisely such romanticism, the magic and art of envisioning and crafting a life – whether in reality, fiction or, somehow, both at once. Before the interview ended, Ude showed a photo of himself, taken in the 1980s. In it, he wears a monocle. 'People would ask if it was a prescription lens,' he said. 'I would say, Yes, for aesthetic vision.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
