Lately, the theme of the Costume Institute’s large spring exhibition—and, in flip, the Met Gala—has typically had an establishing textual reference, whether or not Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp or the works of Virginia Woolf. However 2025’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Type” is especially literary in its origins. Not solely is the present, which considers the determine of the Black dandy, primarily based on visitor curator Monica Miller’s 2009 e book Slaves to Trend: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Id (which started as her PhD dissertation in English literature at Harvard), however its construction can also be impressed by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 essay “Traits of Negro Expression.” So, too, is it full of the voices (and clothes) of an exhilarating vary of Black writers, creatives, and changemakers. These embrace abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass; thinkers corresponding to Maya Angelou and Ta-Nehisi Coates; and pop-cultural icons from Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali to André Leon Talley and Virgil Abloh.
For Miller, a part of the enjoyment of curating “Superfine” with the Costume Institute’s longtime head curator, Andrew Bolton, was weaving broadly acquainted names right into a stunning new context—specifically, a cultural historical past of Black fashion. Take, as an illustration, the ultimate of the exhibition’s 12 themed sections, Cosmopolitanism, for which the thinker Frantz Fanon gives the epigraph: “On the planet through which I journey, I’m endlessly creating myself.”
“Fanon had lots to say about Blackness as a masks,” Miller tells Vogue. “He had lots to say about floor and interiority, in regards to the psychology of how individuals encounter Blackness, and the way in which Black persons are projected into the social, cultural, and political world. He was doing that work—however I don’t suppose individuals count on to see him right here. Whereas somebody like Miles Davis, who we quote in one other part, had lots to say about being cool. Or Frederick Douglass, who had lots to say about respectability, in actually fascinating methods.”
Hurston, in the meantime, is a author that Miller—a professor at Barnard Faculty—teaches on a regular basis (and never solely as a result of Hurston was Barnard’s first Black alumna). Her “eclectic” work as an anthropologist and folklorist enhances an exhibition that, as Miller places it, is “not eager about defining Black dandyism definitively” however relatively in “providing totally different avenues, totally different entry factors” for exploring the politics of Black costume.
