Can We Have An Honest Conversation About The Met Gala’s Exhibition ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’? – Essence
“They don’t even know what they’re looking at!” was meant to comfort me, but couldn’t quite eclipse my concern about extracting Blackness in performance for New York’s art patrons. A concern that echoes this year for the Met Gala, known by many as “fashion’s biggest night out.”
During an Off-Broadway workshop, the creative leadership asked us, a Black femme cast, to embody abstracted Baptist church ladies, the sharp, dandy, culturally subversive women of my memory. When prompted to reflect on the work, my checking account begged for my silence. But the spirit of Mamacita, my late, Black Baptist great-grandmama, a colleague of dandy theorists W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke was louder in my ear. Their embodiment felt tense, I offered; we were dancing near a line of minstrelsy, deconstructing them as theatrical clowns, and for an audience that didn’t recognize these women in their truth, let alone love them.
I was acknowledged as a scholar and thanked for my “indelible contribution” before being quietly let go. The people in power, half of the producing team and all of the creative team, were Black.
These dynamics of power, legibility, identity, and access reflected a heartbreaking truth; even under Black leadership, cultural spectacle can silently siphon more than it liberates. This echo reverberates in my anticipation of this year’s Met Gala. The only difference here is in the stakes; where money is concerned, the New York theater industry makes in a week what the Met Gala makes in a few hours. The parade of extreme power and wealth in this dire global climate of recent years is usually the knife in my spine, but this year’s exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” gently twists it, quietly extracting the rebellious roots of the Black dandy for mainstream consumption.
“They don’t even know what they’re looking at!” The Black dandy flippantly devalues the bourgeoisie, not with talk, but with tact and taste. Monica L. Miller clarifies the Black dandy’s cultural strategy of subversion in her groundbreaking exposé Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Their “fastidiousness or ostentation” punctuates exquisite tailoring with a colorfully detailed flamboyance that undermines the social presumptions of their marginalized roots. In that making-a-way-out-of-no-way style that is characteristic of working-class Black folks, our dandy queers and feminizes sartorial aesthetics to spoil social notions around class. This epitomizes their flyness.
As reimagined in Vogue, host committee member and writer Jeremy O. Harris views a dandy as “the type of man who flaunts his elevated wares much to the awe and fright of many around him.” But as the lens of the fashion upper echelon blurs our view of this “type of man,” we begin to ask: Who really gets to flaunt the dandy’s “elevated wares”? Who has to witness in “awe and fright?” And who can’t afford the cost of the frame?
Black women and femmes seem to be ineligible for it. The performative femininity of Black dandies brilliantly rhyme with the attitudes and struggles of historically marked Black women, and yet, there are no Black women or femmes as co-chairs for this year’s gala. This is a deeply political decision that sounds familiar; it eerily parallels the social power gap between dandies and the people in power they critique, ironically with femininity. However, many are hoping the dolls turn their looks out on The Met’s red steps to reclaim women and femmes within the dandy’s narrative, as symbol and as subjects.
While some will be tuning in for how style icons like Janelle Monáe, Zendaya, and Rihanna and fashion tastemakers like Grace Wales Bonner and Aurora James interpret the theme, the absence of women and femmes who understand the radically insurgent roots of these style traditions doesn’t go unnoticed. In a public statement in 2021, actor and culture worker Indya Moore, for example, echoed a broader public sentiment when they refused, in conscious morality, to return to the event: “We organize millions for a museum on stolen land that Black and brown people suffer on, unless white supremacy thinks they are exceptional—but not for the people?”
But what does it mean when the exceptional people are Black? What if white supremacist legacies of erasure exist under Black leadership? This question stirs beneath this year’s line-up of Black men as co-chairs of the event: Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, and Pharrell Williams, along with honorary chair LeBron James. The line-up also includes Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue and the chief content officer at Condé Nast who is often associated with the Met Gala itself.
For this theme to have been chosen only after the tragic passing of pioneering fashion icon, long-time Vogue editor-at-large, and unmistakable dandy, Andre Leon Talley, is a sort of blasphemy. However, with men like Colman Domingo who effortlessly breathe life into red carpets and award stages in his legacy, Talley’s Superfine aura is sure to be present in spirit, and demands to at least be honored logistically at the event.
Still, the Black men stewarding the show all belong to the top 1%. Their elevation does not absolve the institution; it risks reinforcing it under new management. So is representation enough anymore? Does the fact that these Black leaders are among the rich that dandies would have mocked savor the inheritance of the style tradition or sully it?
Slaves to Fashion makes clear that rich dandies may exist, but they must be subversive and trouble the meanings of status and power. Granted, I have no idea what any of the co-chairs are planning to wear. Ethically, however, there isn’t a single thread that could don the back of a Black millionaire-to-billionaire at The Met Gala that will expose the absurdity of his extreme power in the spirit of dandyism; it would cost him too much. Still, we accept their leadership with knowledge that their power-dressing doesn’t equate to ethical involvement in the tradition. And if we can accept that, then why bother clutching pearls about non-Black celebrities attending the event—people whose participation could be equally as awkward?
As fashion historian and Assistant Curator of Fashion at The Cleveland Museum of Art, Darnell-Jamal Lisby reminds us, “The Met Gala is a fundraiser, with proceeds given back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and used for the resources of The Costume Institute. As a fashion curator myself, I do know how expensive fashion exhibitions can be. They’re probably the most expensive types of exhibitions a museum can do.”
In other words, the name of the Met Gala’s game has always been the same: pay to play. Their engagement with the theme mirrors the dynamic we saw during the summer of 2020, when countless celebrities posted Black squares on Instagram to simulate solidarity without disrupting their own comfort. Many of those same guests will soon be invited to participate in a radically Black-themed event, though far removed from the disruptive, fugitive spirit that birthed Black dandyism in the first place.
The theme’s dress code, “Tailored for You” as suggested by fashion studies scholar and educator Kimberly Jenkins, “becomes this ‘grand closet’ where everyone gets to have a go at exploring what Black dandyism looks like, and we need to think about where we draw the line.” The world is holding onto their hats about how non-Black rich celebrities will interpret this, fearing that the vague openness could deepen the violence of The Met Gala. It could do this not only in convention but with content, subtly opening doors to harmful archetypes of Black folks.
We can only hope that the guests who’ve been invited make use of Black style innovators like Dapper Dan, Telfar Clemens, Kerby Jean-Raymond, and Christopher John Rogers—style architects who don’t just create clothes, but create codes for survival, visibility, and rebellion. But in the context of this event, the rebellious style tradition risks dilution as it is fashioned into costumes for the comfortable.
Many artistic spaces have suffered from the boundlessness of cultural inclusivity, especially cultures that belong to the most marginalized. It is masked as a way to signal inclusivity for all, perpetuating the delusion that everyone should be invited to the party. But when marginalized culture becomes something gatekept by the elite, history begins to repeat itself; the mainstream puts out “DEI” fires by packaging struggle into trends, practicing aesthetics of ‘wokeness’ rather than practicing its ethics. And the misfortune is in our participation in that strange loop.
One thing about us (and we know who we are): our cultural production is never casual; it is always functional first. We dub it fly—not for what it is, but for what it does for us, and how it feels. Only then does the world, overzealous and obsessed with countercultural trends, call it universal. The tricksters among us would argue that that’s not always a bad thing, and I might agree. But in the context of this Met Gala, under this theme, we maybe should start asking: as we include others into the codes to our survival that we’ve been commissioned to preserve, how do we, in turn, exclude ourselves?
I may be naive or off-brand for hoping that the spirit of Black dandyism will be alive through the work of Black designers anyway. Impeccable execution in this case would mean the dandy’s rebellious codes are so deeply embedded in each Black designer’s vision that the rest of the world “won’t even know what they are looking at.”
However, a larger part of me feels like the sentiment is a convenient moral excuse to relinquish consciousness of our intentions and, by effect, the preservation of our codes. In the words of performance studies scholar Fred Moten: “The art being produced is often quite good, but it also reveals a rupture and a set of problems and constraints at the level of the relationship between Black life and Black art that have to be addressed.” So we have to interrogate the problem: who gets to wear the dandy’s power? Who gets tailored, styled, and adorned in details from the margins of society? And to whose “awe and fright?”
Because the real dandies will be outside, in their true fashion of fugitivity and disruption. As Kimberly Jenkins noted, “The Met Gala is not the people’s gala.” People on the margins of society are truly the ones holding the needles that are pushed ever-forward into the fabric of our liberation. This is how the Met Gala has been and will continue to be a site of increasing resistance—and no amount of tailoring Blackness onto the empire that will mitigate that reckoning. The work of the artist has always been to reflect the time, and there are many artists on the outskirts who I am hoping will speak to the moment in protest somehow, if not by divesting from the event altogether.
Nothing about experiencing this world today is superfine other than the people. And they will be outside, too—creative voices more powerful than elite pageantry, sharper than any precision tailoring, and truer than the status and the stage. And we will know exactly what we’re looking at, and why we are looking.
