SOURCES: VOGUE, THE INDIAN EXPRESS
Revered and bestowed with affection worldwide, Met Gala is touted to be fashion’s biggest night. Held every year, it is a fundraising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The first Monday in May commemorates stars and artists in Red Carpet. What’s interesting of 2025 Met Gala is The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibition: ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.’ Inspired from a book, who would have thought that it would one day shape the theme of fashion’s most closely watched event. Monica L Miller’s ‘Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black diasporic Identity’ brought the Black culture to the center stage.
Miller’s academic study made way for 2025 couture spectacle celebrating Black dandyism. It is not just this year that Met Gala turned to literature for thematic ideas. In the year 2024 JG Ballard’s short story, ‘The Garden of Time’ published in the year 1962 served as an inspiration. Ballard’s work is a meditation on the temporal nature of beauty and its eventual decay. Miller’s work examines how Black men appropriated European high fashion to construct an alternative identity. Seen as a resistance to British aristocracy, dandyism is a refusal to fit into ‘acceptable’ categories. Slaves to aristocratic masters, they reworked their master’s wardrobe to carve Black identity. To understand cultural appropriation, let us understand from a regional perspective. Taking Bihari culture as an inspiration, we have often come across women in urban, semi-urban or rural areas to have worn a pair bangle with any western outfit. This cultural interaction born out of colonialism and globalization hints at appropriation as well as resistance to the western culture thus forming an alternative identity.
A companion book for this year’s Met Gala ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ will be released by Yale University Press on June 3. The wardrobe of a black identity sets cultural statement. Its aesthetic is an act of protest rooted in the Civil Rights Movement. Miller has featured the legacy of menswear in American sociologist W E B Du Bois, Julius Soubise, an 18th century free slave who wore diamond-buckled red-heeled shoes, street trends in Harlem Renaissance, contemporary hip-hop, rap and such others. Dandyism thus is an act of defiance. Fashion for a Black dandy is a form of expression; an act of rebellion deeply seated in history. You can’t confine a dandy. Their definition of fashion is beyond sartorial.
Flamboyant and ostentatious, this year’s Met Gala gave Black Dandyism the global attention that was long due. When the clothes did the talking, it subverted European societal norms. Black dandyism has become more than an aesthetic. It has taken the form of an art where the rigid categories of class and race don’t apply. It finally breathes freedom!
PICTURE CREDIT: BILLBOARD