It was around 8:30 pm on Sunday, July 4, 1976, when Sammy Davis Jr. performed on Bob Hope’s Bicentennial Star-Spangled Banner Spectacular, an NBC comedy special celebrating America’s 200-year independence from Great Britain. When Hope asked him to do “a number,” Davis eagerly replied, “I’d love to do it!” and put on a remarkable show, one that bore witness to his larger-than-life-ness.
He performed “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” dressed as a dandy. Or costumed as one, in a light grey suit and white shirt with ruffles peeking out from his jacket’s sleeves and dark grey velvet lapels; in the several gold rings that so famously adorned those jazz hands of his. Known for playing with his style, not a bolo tie, a block loafer, a funky spec, or even a Nehru was a stranger to him.
Davis was the first to come to mind when the Met’s Costume Institute announced its “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibition. I reflect on controversial figures like him quite often. But controversy is, in fact, tied up with what it’s meant to be a Black dandy. In Monica Miller’s “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” which the museum’s exhibition and gala theme is based on, she notes that Black dandies went “from costumed object designed to trumpet the wealth, status and power of white masters to self-styling subjects who use immaculate clothing, arch wit, and pointed gesture to announce their often controversial presence.”
Davis’s sartorial splash and spectacular character trumpeted his own status as a rich Black man, frequently in front of a white audience. And though it was uncomfortable performing at venues where such showgoers enjoyed his talents but hated his race, he knew its power, that ultimately it was more about him than them. Thus the entertainer’s flamboyance formed a kind of embodied critique—exposing power, pushing its limits, kicking down its doors look by look—while still enjoying life’s material pleasures.
“I started with a pinky ring,” he said in a clip from the 2017 documentary “Sammy Davis, Jr: I’ve Gotta Be Me.” He continued, “I must tell you that now I love the rings. Because they’re theatrical. It’s bigger than life.” Perhaps they reminded Davis of the entertainer he said he wanted to be remembered as. According to the Chicago Tribune’s chief theater critic Chris Jones, he was “the greatest entertainer ever to grace a stage in these United States.”
But if Black dandyism is at its core a cultural critique, then Sammy the entertainer is, too, Sammy the critic. A critic by performance. Though, to be sure, he wouldn’t have considered himself in that vein. He regretted not going to school, lamenting in an interview that he could write no better than a second-grader. Yet, that he had donned “superfine” threads among the country’s white, educated elite on world stages, had been the first Black man to stay in The Lincoln Room during Richard Nixon’s term, and had kept smug amid such vile racism, was evidence of his “arch wit.”
I also bring up Davis because he is, to me, not just a Black dandy who lived out these tensions, or a reminiscently archetypal figure, but he is symbolic of the truest ones around today.
Consider Jeremy O. Harris, the dramatist who wears multiple hats as a playwright, actor, screenwriter, producer, muse, and is a host committee member for this year’s Met Gala. After a short stretch as an undergraduate student at DePaul University, he earned a spot in Yale’s playwriting MFA program.
He was on friendly terms with Gucci’s former designer Alessandro Michele, just as Davis had a longstanding relationship with the house (and often rehearsed in his custom Gucci tap shoes). Harris has risen above the notoriously white, elitist spaces of the theatre world. Indeed, of Broadway. And like Davis and every other dandy, he has an unavoidable presence. He takes up space in places where people would rather he go unseen.
Miller uses Matthew, a male character in W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1928 novel “Dark Princess,” to illustrate the layered masculinities in Black dandyism. Du Bois, she says, uses Matthew “and his dandyism primarily as a way to discuss the styles of Black masculinity extant and possible.” Concerning his visibility, she adds he is “at once invisible and hypervisible, a spectacle and socially and politically inconsequential.”
Therein lies why I was so over the moon about this year’s Met Gala theme: the clothes worn by attendees and showcased in the exhibition are ostensibly about Black men’s lives. They broadcast, perhaps now more than ever, the ways race, class, and gender can together explain our experiences. How else does one make sense of “Him” gaining so much lyrical traction among Black male rappers today (Gunna, notably); and how it’s become a statement rather than a mere pronoun?
To be sure, it’s used as a nod to a man’s accomplishment, an affirmation of his greatness. Both have a tinge of “in spite of,” with meanings as unified in their variety as dandies themselves. And yet, one of the reasons this year’s Met Gala theme is such a big deal is that it invites conversation about Black men’s style that, without excluding it, isn’t limited to hip-hop. There’s a universality to it. We can bring our uncles in, our cousins, our dads and grandads, ourselves. On this rare occasion, histories that have long been out of the public’s view are on full display. And no one will be able to overlook it.
