Monica Miller

On the 2025 Met Gala Exhibit and Black dandyism.

By Ava Jolley

Illustrations by Emma Finkelstein

For over 75 years, the fashion world has awaited the first Monday in May with bated breath, anticipating the annual Met Gala. Hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the evening brings high fashion into pop culture as celebrities walk the carpet in extravagant, themed outfits. Next year’s Met Gala theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” centers Black men’s style from the 18th century to the present. It will be a night of firsts—the first Met Gala in two decades to focus on menswear, and the first ever Gala to focus on Black designers. The historic board of co-chairs includes Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton, and Pharrell Williams, with LeBron James as honorary chair—a board of all Black men.

Barnard Professor Monica Miller, Chair of the Africana Studies Department, is the guest curator of the Gala’s accompanying exhibit. The Met Gala theme takes inspiration from Miller’s book, written in 2009, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Fashioning of Diasporic Identity. Born in the 18th-century coterie of European gentlemen, dandyism is both a style and a performance, defined by exaggerated attention to refinement and sophistication of one’s physical appearance. With a collection of garments from the 18th century to today, Miller’s exhibit explores how Black men embrace, ironize, and play with dandyism to create new forms of self-expression. As curator, Miller marks another first: She is the first guest curator for a Met Gala exhibit in eight years.

Trained as a literary and cultural scholar, Miller focuses on fashion history. Her work spans the 18th century to the present, and her recent research focuses on Afro-Swedish studies. No categorization—temporal or spatial—seems to constrain her studies. In our discussion about fashion and culture, Miller moved between time and space, putting otherwise disparate Black dandies into conversation and telling their stories with vividness, reverence, and intimate care.

Miller’s insights into Black dandyism are increasingly important given the conversations about cultural appropriation that have shadowed this year’s Gala theme. Slaves to Fashion begins with an 18th-century painting of an enslaved boy, dressed in a bright red jacket, gold collar, and padlock around his neck—a violent image of “dandified ‘luxury’ slavery,” in Miller’s words. By no means is this an easy fashion history to approach.

When I first read Vanessa Friedman’s New York Times article announcing the 2025 Met Gala, I was struck by how the article approached the violent history of 18th-century Black dandyism. The Met Gala theme takes its name “Superfine” from a phrase in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, an autobiography written by a formerly enslaved man. In the book, Equiano writes, “I laid out above eight pounds of my money for a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom, which I hoped was then at hand.” Yet in her article, Friedman does not name Equiano; instead, she simply calls him an “18th-century enslaved man” and facetiously paraphrases his words: “Essentially, in your face with my outfit!” Friedman erases Equiano’s agency. Her treatment of him feels indicative of the appropriation and the erasure of violence that haunt any complicated history entering mainstream.  Will white celebrities wear the fashions of Black men designers with sensitivity? How will they navigate and address the often violent while also liberatory histories of Black dandyism? 

When asked how white celebrities would engage with the theme, Miller explained that as a guest curator of the exhibit, she had little to do with the Gala itself. Still, it’s an unsettling and important tension that we must consider as the high fashion of the Met Gala often trickles down into the clothing trends of everyday Americans. As Black dandyism enters mainstream culture, my conversation with Miller illuminates the joyful potentials and violent histories of what we may be wearing next fashion season.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Blue and White: Can you define Black dandyism, and how its definition changed from the 18th century to now? 

Monica Miller: When I think about Black dandyism, I don’t want to create a hierarchy, because Black dandyism and dandyism actually occurred simultaneously. People think that the first dandy was a man named Beau Brummell, a middle-class Englishman who, through his incredible hyper-attention and discipline to his dress, became very famous for his style. However, his style was not flamboyant or over the top—it was just precisely tailored. There were all of these rumors about Brummell. People would come to watch him get dressed, because it was such a ritual—this beautiful act of washing his face, doing his hair, and putting clothes on.  He would tie his neck cloth in a very particular way, and if he didn’t get it right, he would throw it away and start with a new one. 

When this discipline and dress became popular in England and then France, Black people got caught up into the style. Sometimes, people would dress their servants in really fancy dress and treat them as objects of conspicuous consumption. The enslaved people who were put into those positions understood very quickly that they were being objectified, and that part of that objectification had to do with this fancy dress. What’s fascinating to me about the racialized version of dandyism is that knowingness. As soon as Black enslaved people were dressed up in this clothing and understood the clothing as an attempt to change their identity, they understood that clothing was really powerful—the ability to style oneself, the ability to self fashion, the ability to use clothing as a tool or strategy.

One of the men in my book is from 18th century England named Soubise. He was one of these dressed-up servants. He got it right away. Having been dressed up, he came to fully occupy that position. He started doing outrageous things in society: He would book a whole box for himself at the opera, he filled his room with all of these hothouse flowers, he had a really expensive coach that he rode in. At the time, many of the coachmen were Black servants, but he had white servants. 

What’s important is what his understanding of that meant for how people were thinking about Blackness—about race, gender, sexuality, and class. It destabilized all of those categories. Black dandyism becomes a strategy to understand the hierarchies in society, and it is sometimes able to manipulate those hierarchies. It’s a visual and performative way to say something about who you think you are. 

B&W: Do you think performance is essential to dandyism or Black dandyism? Or can dandyism just be about the clothing that you wear?

MM: It’s both. For some people, it’s an identity. And sometimes, that identity has to do with discipline. At the end of my book, I talk about a number of artists, some who think about dandyism as an art practice, and others  who are living and breathing it. 

It can be an aesthetics, in terms of how you’re dressed. Traditionally in the 18th century, dandies would have had very particular tail coats. They had top hats, canes, neck cloths, and watches. I think it can also be about politics. There are some people who will dress out of their station, trying to get at and poke into those categories of identity that we tend to take for granted. 

B&W: Did white Europeans understand Black dandyism as a form of subversion?

MM: Yes. Being a dandy was really controversial. It was men, for one of the first times, paying way too much attention to how they looked. That was for women. Being a dandy brought with it accusations of excessive femininity, which led into questions about sexuality. Dandyism is about breaking boundaries—people didn’t know where to put them. 

B&W: Right. I’m curious, there seems to have had to be a shift from Black dandyism as a form of objectification into this form of agency. Do you think that this is through an excess of dandyism? 

MM: I don’t think so. But the movement you’re describing is absolutely right. It’s a movement from being fashioned to self-fashioning. From a sense of captured immobility, a kind of stasis inside of a category, to a sense—occasionally, not always—of freedom, liberation. Sometimes there’s a joy. For some people, some of that excess could be related to joy. 

One of the dandy artists describes dandyism as being the form of deliberate intelligence in the face of boundaries. It is more about attitude than it is necessarily about the costume. I’ve described other moments in my book—not necessarily moments of dandyism, but dandy-like activities—which would include one of the things that enslaved people would do. If they could find or appropriate buttons, ribbon, or something kind of special, they would put it on their standard-issue clothing. That’s not dandyism. But that’s somebody who understands that a button can distinguish you. Something that small can change that drab shirt or dress into something. It helps you to be an individual.

B&W: There’s a New York Times article that references the origin of the Met Gala’s title “Superfine,” but does not mention Olaudah Equiano’s name or the title of his book. Do you think that this article is indicative of some of the dangers of appropriation that threaten Black dandyism?

MM: I don’t know if I would put it that way. In Slaves to Fashion, I look at Black dandyism in moments of societal transition. The first moment is within the slave trade and imperialism.  I look at the relationship between slavery and emancipation in the 19th century. I look at it in the early-1920s Harlem, during urbanization.  These are moments where social conditions are changing and when the dandy appears, because it’s a figure that has all of these anxieties: How are we supposed to think about Black people now? And Black people are like: Well, I’ll show you.  The dandy pops up right when things are being destabilized and has these moments of visualizing different kinds of possibility.

B&W: How do you see the messages of racial and gendered identity having changed from the 18th century to now? What does Black dandyism say about racial identity today?

MM: One of the things we’re hoping to show in the exhibit is that dandyism is something done for and against different audiences. Sometimes Black dandies style or self-style because they’re trying to critique the white gaze. Sometimes dandyism is for the self—it can happen in front of a mirror. Sometimes dandyism is for a particular community that somebody might be a part of. 

The question that you’re asking is, how does dandyism change over time? After emancipation,  there’s much more freedom for black people to be styling for each other. One of the hallmarks of the Harlem Renaissance is artists visualizing, for the first time, what it meant for a Black community to be looking at itself. Black dandyism changes over time because there is more and more possibility. 

B&W: Something I’m trying to pinpoint is the distinction between Black dandyism and Black fashion.

MM: That’s fascinating. Dandyism is about style. And style and fashion are related, but they’re not the same thing. Style requires this deliberate intelligence in the face of boundaries. Style is about that creativity that is not at all dependent on fashion. Fashion is a system. Fashion, I think, is much more tied to consumption and capital. It is its own industry and economy. Style is for everyone. 

B&W: Most of us are familiar with the Met Gala, but less so about the process of exhibit curation behind it. You are the first guest curator in eight years, since the start of Met Gala curator Andrew Bolton’s tenure. How were you tapped? Did you have an exhibition planned?

MM: No. A couple of exhibitions ago, there were two exhibitions at the Costume Institute about American fashion. In both, you couldn’t tell the story without Black fashion designers. Andrew had been thinking about the ways in which he could further develop some of those exhibition’s stories. At the same time, the Met had been working to diversify its exhibitions: There have been quite a few exhibitions that handle race and Blackness. 

Unfortunately, Vogue editor André Leon Talley passed away in 2022. Andrew was wondering how he could do an exhibit related to Leon Talley, but the Costume Institute rarely does exhibitions on a person who is in the media industry. And then somebody gave Andrew my book. 

However, the exhibition has to also be true to the Costume Institute’s collection. So, while the Costume Institute may not have a lot of work by Black dandy designers specifically, they do have dandyism within the collection. They’re better positioned to do—and Andrew would say this himself—an exhibition on dandyism of any kind than they would be on hip hop or street style. So, he read my book, talked to some people, and then he called me. 

B&W: Wow. And do you watch the Met Gala every year?

MM: Oh yeah, every year. And the thing is, I had been consulting on some other exhibitions: I had worked with the curatorial team at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology for many years, and I’d been a consultant for two exhibitions at the New York Historical Society. It’s not as if this was something completely out of the blue. But it is a very different thing to interpret a book I wrote years ago—to go from text and visual imagery to garments and objects. That part has been amazing. 

B&W: Do you have a favorite garment in the exhibit?

MM: I have some things that I’m really excited for people to see and to think about. The  Costume Institute’s research assistant Kai Toussaint Marcel managed to find some garments and accessories that were worn by Frederick Douglass.

B&W: Oh, wow. 

MM: Right? A top hat, a beautiful monogrammed shirt, a coat, a pair of pants, a comb, and sunglasses. I had never before thought of Frederick Douglass wearing sunglasses. These objects take up a lot of space in the exhibition, because they’re really asking people to think about how this particular Black man in the 19th century wanted to present himself to the world. He’s the most photographed man in the 19th century, of any race. He understands profoundly the stakes of his appearance, for both Black people who were looking to emulate his dignity, and white people who he needed to convince that Black people “deserved” freedom.

But there are also contemporary garments I love. Some of them are really playful. We have a section that’s based in the seventies—it’s when Black male fashion starts to take on aspects of femininity: ruffles, sequins, and tight silhouettes. There’s this pair of green, sequined pants pants from a young New York designer named Theophilio. The model who wears them on the runway is bare chested. He is just loving himself. It’s a moment of joy, of completely being in your body.

B&W: Are there any women in the exhibit? Or is it solely focused on men’s style?

MM: It’s primarily focused on men. During the slave trade and enslavement, Black women at the time—and this is the profundity of it—were so much more curtailed in their movements, and in their ability to have choice, that it was harder to see them in history. Black men were easier to see in the historical record. But women are there all along. 

One of the stories that we’re excited about is William and Ellen Craft: an enslaved couple who race- and cross-dressed their way to freedom. Ellen had a very light complexion, and they realized that she could probably pass for a white man. So she dressed up as a man, and her husband pretended to be her servant. She crossdressed race and class and he, in some ways, played himself.

B&W: But not really.

MM: Right. Because he was playing a servant to this fictional character. She bought this white beaver top hat that we have an example of in the show. She had to hide her face because she didn’t have any facial hair, so she put this bandage around her face. Then they got on a train, and once they got off, they went back to their typical normal dress. Clothing literally moved them from one status to another. 

We have another couple of women we were thinking about: Grace Jones and the beautiful way she takes on androgyny, and Gladys Bentley, a lesbian blues musician in the 1920s who wore a white tuxedo.  Janelle Monáe is hopefully writing for the exhibition catalog. So, we’re thinking about particular stories that are about women when they adopt “female masculinity.” How does that push against these categories of freedom and liberation? What do you think you know about gender anyway? What do you think you see? Are you seeing sexuality? How are you seeing that? It’s all about asking those questions.

B&W: I’m so excited to see the exhibit. Who are you most looking forward to seeing walking the Met Gala carpet?

MM: Everyone, but especially Colman Domingo, whose style is fierce and fabulous.

B&W: And are you attending the Met Gala? 

MM: I believe I am.

B&W: Do you know what you’re going to wear? 

MM: I do not know. It’s wild. And nothing I ever anticipated.