06-05-2025
Paloma Elsesser on Celebrating Maximilian Davis—and the Spirit of Black Dandyism—With Her 2025 Met Gala Ferragamo Look
It was during that time that Max and I became constants. From basements to whispery FaceTimes to lavish fashion week parties, and now, here at the Met. Our friendship has always been about reverence—his for poetry through design, mine for presence, and a shared language of beauty, discipline, and play.
This is my sixth Met Gala. Each one carries its own weather system, its own myth. Working with my beloved stylist Carlos Nazario, we have learned to shape narrative through dress; through silhouette, through fabric, through tension and restraint. When working with my dear friend Fara Homidi for the beauty look, we leaned into balance. Fresh, bouncy, honest skin and a strange but sophisticated almost powdery red lip, that needed not to match the dress. My hair, done by the angelic Joey George, was a literal twist on the French twist but done in an almost alien-like shape that replicated a seam, a nod to the theme.
Photo: Heidi Stanton
Photo: Heidi Stanton
But among all of this, this year, the story is Max. This year, I wanted to honor him.
He is, to his closest, affectionately known as Maxine. To the world, he is a poet, a designer, a thinker, but to me, he is elegance among chaos. He is restraint as resistance. He is the embodiment of Black dandyism, not as aesthetic but as inheritance, as strategy, as declaration. Black dandyism is not about assimilation. It is about subversion. It takes the tropes of thinness, whiteness, and wealth, and rejects them. It is precision. It is defiance wrapped in silk.
