Five hundred people RSVP-ed to Monday morning’s media preview for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the majority appeared to show up to tour the show before it bows to the public on Saturday.
Beforehand, attendees got a primer about dandyism, the exhibition’s undercurrent. They also were reminded by the Met’s director and chief executive officer Max Hollein that the museum is “having a little party tonight aka the Met Gala.” And this year’s annual fundraiser for the Costume Institute is a record-breaker at $31 million.
That was “quite a jump” compared to last year’s total of $26 million, Hollein said after the program. As for how that happened in such economically and geopolitically shaky times, he said, “The level of support, enthusiasm and importance of what we do is significant, especially this show, which is not only a celebration of Black designers, but it’s also a statement. It’s an important exhibition about history. That all comes to the fore. That’s what a lot of our supporters felt — that it is meaningful and important.”
“And the Met Gala is just an outstanding place to be connected. We see continuously growing support for that,” Hollein said, adding that the gala’s fundraising allows the Met to not only operate the Costume Institute, but also “to further expand on the stories that it wants to tell and the collections that it needs to and wants to preserve,” according to Hollein.
A preview of the Met’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibit.
Masato Onoda/WWD
Condé Nast’s chief content officer and Vogue’s editor in chief Anna Wintour has been leading that charge since she started cochairing the Met Gala in 1995 with the exception of the 1996 and 1998 events. In 2014, the Costume Institute was renamed for Wintour. Condé Nast provides support for the Met Gala but Louis Vuitton is this year’s lead sponsor.
Andrew Bolton, Colman Domingo and Max Hollein attend the press preview of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”
AFP via Getty Images
Thom Browne, Tory Burch, Jacques Agbobly, Stephen Jones and Jeffrey Banks were among the designers in the crowd, as well as Tony-winning costume designer Dede Ayite, the CFDA’s Steven Kolb, Condé Nast’s chief executive officer Roger Lynch, the model Abdou Ndoye and fashion historian Lana Turner. Wearing a fuchsia Ozwald Boateng suit, the actor Colman Domingo, one of the cochairs of the Met Gala, spoke movingly about how his stepfather, his biological father and his brother influenced his sense of style. He also singled out André Leon Talley, Dapper Dan, Boateng, Sidney Poitier, Prince, Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, and Met Gala cochairs Pharrell Williams and A$AP Rocky.
The Costume Institute’s chief curator Andrew Bolton spoke of how Talley was a catalyst for “Superfine,” due to how one of the obituaries after his death in 2022 referenced him as “a true dandy, like those in favorite novels by Balzac and Baudelaire.” Bolton also noted how the spring exhibition is the Costume Institute’s first that addresses race and is its first menswear-focused show in 20-plus years.
As for what Talley might have thought of his role in “Superfine,” one of his former Vogue colleagues, Hamish Bowles, said afterward, “I think André would be bowled over by it. It’s vindication in a way of everything that he stood for.”
A John Galliano-designed navy wool twill coat, monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage and a caftan that belonged to Talley are on view. Fittingly, in 1974, two years after Talley earned a master’s degree from Brown University, he worked at the Met’s Costume Institute for Diana Vreeland dressing mannequins for the “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design” exhibition.
Superfine’s guest curator, Monica L. Miller, whose 2009 book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” was a starting point for the exhibition, opened her remarks by reading from Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and emphasizing the question that the novel asks, “Well, what design and whose?” While the show does not set out to answer that question, Miller said that dandyism by definition is an act of a refusal and noted that dandies can push boundaries of gender, class, sexuality, race, and Blackness.
Thom Browne and Tory Burch at the preview.
AFP via Getty Images
After the program wound down, most of the attendees headed for the exhibition, where menswear by Botter, Virgil Abloh, Grace Wales Bonner, Bianca Saunders, Theophilio, Marvin Desroc, LaQuan Smith, Maximilian Davis for Ferragamo and other Black designers are on display. There, they also found mannequins designed by Tanda Francis and Joyce Fung. Francis said she was inspired by the Sapeur culture of Congo, where clothing was used to rebel against colonizers. “As I suspect is true today, without anything, they would make the look happen and literally stop traffic to get their message across,” Francis said.
Francis said that seeing the work in progress in the galleries caused her to literally take a step back. “I’ve seen one head for so long, and to see them multiplied and having completely different attitudes and personalities depending what they had on was a stunning thing to see.”
Fashion historian Turner said, “Monica Miller, an academic, has had her work become a place for international thinking. It could stay in the halls of academia, where the book has sat for a minute — other than for people, who think about fashion.” Instead of just presenting the notion of Black dandies, Miller’s curating is prompting people to talk about its history “in a place that most people wouldn’t think about, and now that is finding its way into the consciousness of people who weren’t thinking about that,” Turner said.
Monday’s preview also provided a first glimpse of the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” shop, where designs from Johnny Nelson, Denim Tears, Brother Vellies, L’Enchanteur, Off-White and Pat McGrath Labs can be found.
