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New York Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Superfine' Brings Radiant Black Style to the Costume Institute
It's probably too much to show up at one of these Costume Institute shows looking for the object that ties the whole thing together. Just because they're about clothes doesn't mean they have to do what a smart outfit does. And yet damn if I didn't find a single object in this year's installment that accomplishes just that, an et voilà piece that not only brings off the show itself but explains the courage that clothes have lent a people, a people who often weren't meant — in the lands that either enslaved them or bankrolled their enslavement — to possess either: power or clothes, at least not the good ones. So here's to 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,' the institute's 2025 edition, nestled within the flowing space of the Cantor Exhibition Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and dreamed up and curated by the scholar Monica L. Miller, with Andrew Bolton, who heads the Costume Institute. Are the galleries done in solemn gunmetal tones? They are. Is that title academically ambiguous? 'Fraid so. But it's luminous and vital anyway. It understands the particular significance of most of its objects and where to situate them for maximal emotional bang. Three hundred years of garments, accessories and sartorial ideas, paintings, videos, sketches and cartoons, get-ups from recent collections by super brands with Black stewardship (Louis Vuitton menswear, Balmain) and comparatively newish Black designers (L'Enchanteur, Bstroy, Wales Bonner, Denzil Patrick) have all been assembled and meticulously arranged into 12-part themes, a structure that borrows quite loosely from Zora Neale Hurston's delightfully asserted taxonomy, from 1934, 'Characteristics of Negro Expression.' The themes ('Distinction,' 'Jook,' 'Cool,' 'Heritage,' for starters) are arranged into a chronology that weds a history of fashion to the evolution of the African diaspora. We're talking hundreds of pieces — shoes, coats, scarves, jewelry, luggage, happy-plantation-painted buttons, whole outfits on strapping onyx mannequins, not to mention The Hair, complete with so many side and middle parts that Moses had to be the barber) — all in a space whose open floor can narrow into alleys that land you in startling proximity to the unexpected. That's how I found my banger. I had made my way into the 'Ownership' section that began my route through the show (no one says you have to obey the path of the themes, but it does culminate in a story that rewards adherence). It includes a case holding a 300-year-old livery waistcoat in tender lavender silk alongside a cropped number in tan wool so stiff with age that, at this point, it looks as heavy as a travertine slab. A child had worn it. Each section situates the historical garments near a contemporary counterpart. In 'Ownership,' one such connection involved encasing those waistcoats below a double-breasted Balmain suit with gold-covered effects. The invitation comes early to savor a distinctly unsavory truth: that such children would have been an adornment, adorned. On an enslaved person, particularly a boy, Western finery aroused laughter. Eventually, an elegantly attired Black person could seem risible, to a white eye (or an eye trained to see whitely) — not clothed so much as costumed. A meaty section devoted to blackface-minstrel-era caricatures underscores the alleged comedy, and the comedy begins with fashionable clothes — sometimes dated — on ink-black figures with puffed out chests. froggy legs and paddle feet. And it was just about there, on the thematic border between 'Disguise' and 'Freedom,' that my heart began to race, my thoughts quickened. An argument was coming into focus — the show's. I mean, this thing could have gotten by on implication, that clothes on Black people had been a gag that the maligned transfigured into success, by way of mold-melters like Ozwald Boateng and Virgil Abloh, André Leon Talley and Iké Udé (the latter three are in heavy rotation throughout the show; Udé's credited as a consultant). But the wealth of imagery and wall text and theme gathers force. Those caricatures, for instance, land in the 'Freedom' section, whose historical objects hail from the 19th century. On one wall is a six-portrait gallery of Black gentlemen (some named, some unknown; same with the artists). They sit with nobility and, in an instance or two, with attitude, flair, nerve, one stratospherically arched brow. At least two strike a pose new to my decades of standing before portraiture: the dangled arm. They're sitting so that a limb hangs behind the chair. I laughed. I laughed because it's alway funny to rediscover how signifyingly Black we African Americans have always been. Those arms look at liberty. But the longer I stood there and stared at these men, I noticed something else — not the banger, not yet; give me a moment. In the vicinity of this dignified sextet sits a garment called a stock. It stands long, stiff and high as it cuffs the neck; often the collar points are turned up and you'd tie an ascot around it. All six of these men are depicted wearing one. It lends regency, but I found myself wondering very particularly about comfort., Those U.F.O. ruffled neck rings (they're called ruffs) that one finds in, say, the portraiture of Frans Hals came to mind. A ruffed neck floats looks guillotined, it resembles a ready-to-serve roast. Likewise, on a Black 19th-century neck, a stock conveys torture. (You'd secure one with buckles and straps.) You notice the grip of a virtuous detail like that, how the head rests atop it, and you also think 'vise.' An arched eyebrow, then, transmits enhanced defiance. Again, 'Freedom' is where we are here. That section shares a permeable border with its neighbor, 'Respectability.' And I laughed again, because you can feel the show succeeding at narrowing an ancient tension over presentation within Black culture down to a matter of garments. A respectable appearance never guaranteed respect. A respectable appearance seemed to invite a certain disrespect. But for a long while, to this day perhaps, presentation is what a Black American had in lieu of policy. The clothes became a politics. So it was moving to be able to study one of W.E.B. Du Bois's laundry tickets and feel, at last, equal to a legend in the single arena of fastidiousness. A detail like that doesn't simply humanize. It poignantly regularizes, makes him newly real. I was making my way from 'Freedom' into that adjacent realm of respectability — my eyes peering anew, having taken in scores and scores of images and objects, knowing full well about the accompanying 371-page, 100-ton catalog, and having considered for a thousandth time the profound significance of Black Americans being able to wear more than fabrics that could make even a potato weep — when I found The Garment. It rests in a case within eyeshot of 20th-century suiting by Jeffrey Banks and sexy outfits (by Polo, no less), and so there's a world in which I drift right past it, past the case with Frederick Douglass's tailcoat. Now, I know: I dragged you all this way, down one cul-de-sac after the next, for a coat? I can explain. Frederick Douglass's tailcoat, in black brushed wool, stands in a vitrine alongside his other effects: the gold, leashed pocket watch he adored; a pair of shades and levitating top hat; a cane, white vest and matching ban-collar shirt whose bib is monogrammed, in script, with the tiniest red 'D.' There's a comb that's poignantly minuscule considering the plumes this man was working with. In all: A hero's kit. The tailcoat sits on an invisible mount. So it seems to float. Too many of the clothes in the show — in most Costume Institute shows, in fact — stand on nosebleed shelving that deny sufficient appreciation. (Bring a ladder.) But Douglass's coat is just about perfectly scaled. And what you notice about it is its wide diameter. The distance from the back to the front could pass for a canyon. The capaciousness of the cavity his body leaves in absence is something to behold. Douglass, we know, was one of the most photographed people of the 19th century. It's the voice, however, blasting from a mouth that in those pictures is closed. We've had to imagine how, for decades, it decried enslavement. It's the voice that helped elevate him, formerly enslaved himself, to the pantheon of the century's extraordinary figures, that made him as much a founding father as the country's official sires. No known recordings exist of it; you can, however, read plenty about the skin his oratory pimpled, the pulses it spiked, the minds it pried open. So if the invisible mount's proportions are to be believed (and I'm choosing to believe them, to believe in them, in the myth they inspire), the coat's cavity makes evident the power of what we'll never hear. This garment is evidence of the galvanic force of his oratory, which was a weapon of what back then they called moral suasion. Hovering like that it seemed armored and somehow alive. How big, I wondered, was this man's chest? His lungs? His heart? A garment like that explains a crucial aspect of fashion. A garment like that explains why they didn't want us to have any access to it. I'VE FAILED TO MENTION what this show is actually about. They've called it 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.' But its animating impulse stems from this idea of dandyism. The dandy is a gentlemen, from the 18th and 19th century, who delights in the cultivation of personal style. If clothes talk, the dandy is a chatterbox. A Black dandy begins as a joke that white people enjoyed telling and Black people repossessed and remixed. A Black dandy chatters out the side of his mouth, under his breath, with his whole face. A Black Dandy is any Black person with the nerve to dress to impress. Well, almost. There's plenty of function to dandyism. But there's also an element of frippery, frolic, foolishness. Miller adapted Superfine, more or less, from her book, from 2009, 'Slave to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of the Black Diasporic Identity.' (There was no way the Met was calling this show that.) And what's impressive about that spatially narrowing stretch, where the chronology runs from the American antebellum age to the start of the 20th century, where the gallery floor expands, is how it clearly, yet quietly permits you to see how dandyism rebelled against respectability (and therefore against churchliness), against the idea that 'proper' attire was the sole key to advancement. Douglass's tailcoat feels like a gateway between approaches. After him, style seems freer, too. Not every piece in the show constitutes what strikes me as dandyism. Were the Black Panthers dandies? They were sharp, obviously, but they were minimalists. Their leathers and noirs are here mostly in contemporary reconsiderations that, tellingly, exist on an island among the show's themed areas — is this 'Disguise,' 'Ownership,' 'Heritage'? Here, they seem (as much of the show does) queer: a state of being that dandyism enhances as both a form of expression and the resistance to conditions, to being conditioned. To that end, André Leon Talley, the fashion journalist and creative auteur, reasonably operates like a talisman throughout the show. Yet maybe it's too reliant upon his relentless gumption, too obligated to showcase to it. One of the more inspired ideas in 'Superfine' entails what athletes have worn ('Champions'). Much of that section is devoted to young jockeys, the sports heroes of the day, stars — until Jim Crow helped banish Black riders from the sport. Standing there, in front of the boxing shorts and the jockey's breeches and silk tops, I actually whispered, 'Daddy…' Yes, I could've meant some gay guy with an outsize foxiness. But I was referring to my actual father, Arnold Wesley Morris, a sprinter and track coach who, with his mesh tops under double-breasted blazers, short-shorts and loafers, shades and a cherry-on-top baseball cap, could've been in this show. Daddy, you were a dandy! I will admit that before that Douglass vitrine, Superfine had been feeling a bit notional. I had been craving more 'for examples,' which, I know, is a lofty ask for a project whose reach predates the photograph. But every time you get an image like the one Diane Arbus took of the drag performer and Stonewall Riot warrior, Stormé DeLarverie or Andy Levin's photo of the jazz and blues great 'Uncle Lionel' Batiste, captured with cash leaking from one of his suits, you're greedy for even further proof. These are clothes that demand a sidewalk or a stadium tunnel — you want more reminders of the dandies of the WNBA, from standup and hip-hop. But an intelligence is at work here; it's playful, connective, bright-siding. It maybe trusts that that tailcoat of Douglass can do a lot of work, opening this show up and out. Now, it'd be crazy to say that this man bellowed and inveighed and endangered himself so that the zoot-suiter could stroll; and Harold and Fayard Nicholas could throw on tuxes then, over and over, leap 10 feet in the air then land in a split; so that Prince could spend 'Purple Rain' in that pearly white Little Lord Fauntleroy shirt; or Sylvester could make geometry of a sequined blazer. But there's something about the sight of all that diameter, all of its capacity that says for every sweater, sneaker, sweatsuit, jacket or pair of jeans presented in Douglass's wake, amazement is possible, life is possible. You don't leave Superfine wondering if anybody has the nerve, the daring, the vision, the diction to fill a single shoe. The question is, who on Earth could fit that coat?
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Suki Waterhouse Is Daring in a Deconstructed Tuxedo Dress at the 2025 Met Gala
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Suki Waterhouse is celebrating the first Monday in May. The singer has made her grand return to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ascending the carpeted steps for the 2025 Met Gala, Waterhouse looked utterly glamorous in a Michael Kors creation: a deconstructed black tuxedo dress with a backless silhouette, a thigh-high leg slit, and a dramatically long and skinny train. She zhuzhed up the classic look with a diamond necklace, a black clutch, and satin pumps. Getty Images Getty Images Getty Images Dia Dipasupil - Getty Images The dress code for this year's Met Gala is 'Tailored for You,' which is derived from the Costume Institute's exhibition theme, 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.' The Institute developed the theme by taking inspiration from Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, a 2009 book by Barnard College professor Monica L. Miller. 'I feel that the show itself marks a really important step in our commitment to diversifying our exhibitions and collections, as well as redressing some of the historical biases within our curatorial practice,' head curator Andrew Bolton said. 'It's very much about making fashion at the Met more of a gateway to access and inclusivity.' This is the first exhibition since 2003 that will be solely focused on menswear. Appropriately, Pharrell Williams, Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, and Lewis Hamilton have been appointed as co-chairs. Waterhouse last attended the Met Gala in 2023 with boyfriend Robert Pattinson. At the time, she looked elegant in a transparent Fendi dress stitched with colorful floral embroidery, while Pattinson looked suave in a classic navy blue tux designed by Dior Men. You Might Also Like
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Met Gala First Look: Photos From The ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style' Exhibit
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways The 2025 Met Gala will soon be underway, with a few privileged guests arriving to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art early Monday (May 5) morning to take in the exhibit accompanying fashion's biggest night out, 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.' The exhibit is the first of the Met's Costume Institute to, 'deal directly with race, alongside, gender, class, and sexuality, and only the second-ever devoted to menswear,' according to host publication, Vogue. Alongside head curator Andrew Bolton, the presentation is curated by Monica Miller, professor and chair of Africana Studies at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is also the author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, the 2009 tome that initially inspired the exhibit and gala's theme. As the emphasis this year will be on tailoring, we can say goodbye to the lavish gowns of Met Galas past in favor of elite suiting, as exhibited though years of Black style and the influence of well dressed black men known as Dandies. The exhibit also highlights three aspects of Black style that speak directly to Black life; 'Respectability,' a section highlighting more traditional suiting often worn when 'code switching' or blending in with mainstream style, 'Heritage,' which takes direct influence from traditional African design styles, and 'Cool,' which showcases 'fits that have defined what's hot and what's not over the past 50 years. Following tonight's red carpet, celebrities will also enter the exhibit to take it all in. Check out some of its stand-out looks hours before the stars do below! More from Best of Sign up for Vibe's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
New York Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Dandy Night
Early May means the world's biggest celebrities are wearing outrageous clothes. It's why we love covering the Met Gala, which raises money for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's costume wing. The gala officially opens the Costume Institute's exhibition 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,' examining 300 years of Black fashion and the history of Black dandyism. Attended by the rich and famous and hosted, as always, by Anna Wintour, this year's gala raised the most money ever in its history — $31 million. Yet the party and the exhibition about Black style have a different feel than its planners may have intended. The political landscape looked very different when the Met announced the show in October, The Times's chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, explained. Back then, Kamala Harris, the first Black woman ever to top a major-party ticket, was in the final weeks of her campaign for the White House. Now, the federal government has targeted all things involving diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as programming related to race — especially in cultural institutions. The show has other political baggage, too. The Costume Institute has never had a Black curator, and the Met has its own history of racism. (This exhibition is the brain child of Andrew Bolton, the institute's chief curator. It's based on a 2009 academic text called 'Slaves to Fashion' by Monica L. Miller, a Barnard professor who helped put the show together.) Despite many D.E.I. initiatives after 2020, the fashion world failed to make good on its promises; of the more than 15 recent appointments at the top of major brands, not a single one was Black.
The Sun
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Embarrassing moment shouting match erupts outside Met Gala hotel as ‘guest refused entry to The Carlyle' before U-turn
A MYSTERY woman was physically stopped from going into the hotel where celebrities are getting ready for the 2025 Met Gala, just as A-listers were trying to leave. A shouting match began when she tried to breeze inside before security guards had to push her back onto the sidewalk and escort her to the curb just hours before the iconic event began. 3 3 The scuffle was caught on a live stream set up to capture celebrities leaving the historic Carlyle Hotel to make their way to the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just a few blocks away. The woman, carrying a Sephora bag and wearing a gray tracksuit, was refused entry into the hotel and pulled away by cops at the scene. Onlookers crowded outside the hotel for a glimpse at A-listers watched the embarrassing moment unfold in the pouring rain as the woman shouted at the guards keeping her out. "I'm staying at this hotel," the woman told guards, adding that she had "three rooms." "I'm not leaving." She went on to scream and point, saying, "I paid for my room here!" The woman then tried to enter another door of the hotel, which is when she was dragged out by cops. As the woman spoke with New York Police Department officers after the confrontation, someone from inside the building rushed outside to join the conversation. After a brief discussion, officials then gestured to allow the women into the hotel. The woman then began recording the people who pushed her out as she was visibly frustrated with being denied entrance. "I'm so mad right now," she said as she stormed back onto the street to take pictures of the cops who kept her out of the hotel. She then said she would sue the NYPD. It's unclear who the woman is or why she was denied entrance at first. Thankfully, she made her way into the building and out of the rain just a few minutes after the confrontation started. Superfine: Tailoring Black Style — 2025 Met Gala's theme explained This year's Met Gala theme Superfine: Tailoring Black Style was announced on October 9, 2024, but what does it mean? It is inspired by a new exhibit at the Costume Institute that focuses on Black style, notably Black dandyism from the 18th century through to its resurgence in the 1920s and 30s in the Harlem Renaissance and its influence on present day. Dandyism speaks to elegant and often excessive fashion used for self-expression that often breaks norms and can be seen as a form of rebellion. Attendees have been told that the dress code is "Tailored for you" and that the theme explores how fashion has been used to both enslave and liberate. It is inspired by the book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism And The Styling Of Black Diasporic Identity (2009), written by professor and chair of Africana studies at Barnard College, Monica L Miller. This exhibition marks a significant step in diversifying the Met's collections and addressing historical biases in curatorial practices. Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge, emphasized the importance of making fashion at The Met more accessible and inclusive. Hotel staff told The U.S. Sun it was unclear what sparked the awkward scene because so many people are coming in and out of the hotel. The chaos went down after celebrities including Colman Domingo, Emma Chamberlain, and Teyana Taylor, had already left the hotel for the event, which is considered fashion's biggest night of the year. Cops are on high alert for the event as political demonstrators are already gathered outside the iconic red carpet. Former officer Michael Alcazar told The U.S. Sun that security operations are as tight as possible due to the high-profile nature of the event. "The NYPD has to be prepared for every eventuality,' Alcazar said. He said cops enact a "frozen zone" to fence out the Met, barricading certain areas from members of the public. 3
