Darryl Pinckney
An exhibition on Black fashion over the course of the last three centuries presents costuming as self-creation.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: “Freedom” gallery section.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, curated by Monica L. Miller with Andrew Bolton, William DeGregorio, and Amanda Garfinkel, with help from Kai Marcel, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York City, through October 26, 2025
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In her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston tells us that “the will to adorn” among black people arises from the desire for beauty. “There can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much.” Hurston was looking at the newspaper ads and calendar illustrations that black people used to decorate the walls of their cabins during the Depression in the 1930s. In Monica L. Miller’s original study Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009), and now in the Metropolitan Museum exhibition that it inspired—the Costume Institute’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style—the curator-scholar takes that aesthetic off the wall and puts it on the black self.
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Tailor boys at work, 1899–1900. Photo: Museum of Modern Art.
In both her book and the exhibition, Miller chronicles how black people in the US and Europe went from being objects that spoke of someone’s wealth to being people for whom style was an assertion of their humanity. Black people believed they should “change clothes” at the moment of liberation, she notes, citing a beautiful moment in Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789): “I laid out above eight pounds of my money for a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom.” Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century garments that belonged to black people have not survived, Miller points out. Neither has the work of early twentieth-century professional black tailors. However, at the Met, Miller makes good use of the visual record to illustrate this chronicle: oil paintings, watercolors, prints, engravings, daguerreotypes, photography, and, in the twentieth century, film. (And plenty of accessories, from painted ivory-verre buttons to top hats.)
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured, left, in “Jook” gallery section: Miguel Covarrubias, Harlem Dandy (African American man [head & shoulders] wearing a hat with tilted brim), ca. 1930.
A quiet, slow instrumental version of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” plays on a loop as you navigate artist Torkwase Dyson’s darkly lit, intricate exhibition layout of aisles, platforms, and arches. The material is organized according to historical themes, such as “Presence” (Julius Soubise, enslaved in the Duchess of Queensbury’s household, became after his manumission a famous man of fashion in eighteenth-century London); or “Champion” (black jockeys and boxers such as Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali, and athletic gear); or “Jook” (nightlife and a Miguel Covarrubias litho crayon of a Harlem dandy circa 1930 and zoot suits similar to those worn by Malcolm X in his gangster youth in the 1940s); or “Heritage” (the influence of Africa and militant black nationalism on black style in the sixties); or “Cosmopolitanism” (as exemplified by André Leon Talley’s suite of Louis Vuitton luggage). Many of the photographs interspersed through the galleries speak of high fashion, the suit as one of its basic units, and the black male body as a reclaimed symbol or site of elegance.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: “Cosmopolitanism” gallery section.
Dandyism in Europe had been associated with the man of leisure. However, Miller democratizes dandyism as the self-definition black people found in what was called fancy dress. Costume can be self-creation even for those who must wait until the weekend when they are off duty. A janitor’s motives will not be different from Beau Brummell’s. Black dandyism radiated confidence in the beauty of black men. Still, a cultural narrative retold for a mainstream audience inevitably involves selection, and here, the black street has been left far behind. Throughout the exhibition, instead, black stars and black leaders are cast as trendsetters in self-presentation. Miller displays the work of contemporary black designers—Grace Wales Bonner, Virgil Abloh, Andrew M. Ramroop, Emeric Tchatchoua, Telfar Clemens, Ib Kamara, Bianca Saunders, Morty Sills, Jeffrey Banks, Jacques Agbobly, Marvin Desroc, Edvin Thompson, Pharrell Williams, Foday Dumbuya, Daniel Day, Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore, Ozwald Boateng. (That there are a lot of names in the exhibition is part of Miller’s point.) Their creations are fitted on dozens of dramatically placed ebony mannequins, with heads designed by Tanda Francis—specimens representing the “uninterruptedly sublime” (as per the catalog) in dandyism. Impressive, these figures dominate the show and are also as intimidating as insiders at an after-party you were invited to by accident. They seem to have been modeled on the principle that the classic dandy is not supposed to notice the sensation he causes when he comes into view. Perhaps the aggression in high style accounts for its mass appeal.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: “Cool” gallery section.
Miller also includes photographs of W. E. B. Du Bois with waistcoat, gloves, cane. (Who or what look was Du Bois imitating, or blending in with? Influences and the constant cultural exchange between the black minority and the white majority that Ralph Ellison insisted segregation never stopped are a part of the story, if somewhat under-examined here.) But Du Bois resented being labeled a dandy, Miller concedes. It linked him to places and people he avoided; he thought it belittling to what he stood for. Further, the dandy was not entirely respectable in his socially uptight Negro Protestant world, alert to slanders about the sexuality of black men (and black women, for that matter). Yet for any black man to dress as a gentleman was a provocation in an era when white people in the South burned down the homes of black people if their dwellings were too pretty. Extravagance of dress was a dare and implied that the dandy lived outside convention; exclusion makes dandyism a form of dissent in Miller’s history. Du Bois couldn’t help it; he embodied what Baudelaire identified as the “aristocratic superiority of mind” that to him was an essential trait of the dandy.
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pictured: “Heritage” gallery section.
Concerned though Miller is with the power of style and black identity as social challenge, she also hopes that Superfine will be an addition to the history of fashion. Africa Fashion at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2023 might have been more electrifying in its sartorial discoveries, but Superfine has the hauteur of majestic summation: the black presence is in bloom. Let it be Wakanda Time.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels and four works of nonfiction, most recently, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022).