The 2025 Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” looks to celebrate the artistry and craft distinctive to tailoring through the lens of Black male style. The exhibition, which was inspired by Monica Miller’s “Slaves to Fashion,” explores Black male identity and expression through the sartorial lens of dandyism as a means to define a lifestyle of wealth, distinction and taste.
Fashion and dandyism enthusiasts will immediately recall writings about historical fashion figure and dandy Beau Brummell, an arbiter of men’s style in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Yet the term “dandy” is an agile descriptor, applicable to the evolution of men’s fashion choices — whether individual or culturally inspired — over decades.
Miller, the first cocurator of a Costume Institute exhibition and first Black woman to have this distinction, is joined by A$AP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton and Pharrell Williams — the first all-Black male Met Gala committee. Each committee member is noted for their global fashion influence across the genres of music, sports and entertainment. They are included in WWD’s celebration of the 2025 Met Gala theme “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” alongside icons of style and leisure, captured in the pages of WWD over decades. Included here are actor Sidney Poitier, basketball legend Walt “Clyde” Frazier, and entertainer Little Richard, among others, whose individual style transcends race, gender and identity.
