The annual Met Gala had all eyes on artist Cy Gavin’s daffodil and midnight blue carpet for the most glamorous evening of the year, where Anna Wintour and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute welcomed celebrity guests for another opportunity to show their bold, whimsical, sometimes cringeworthy looks. This year’s theme was about more than just showing off wacky threads, it was about telling the triumphant story of Black dandyism in all its glory.
The Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, as explained on the Met’s website, “explores the importance of style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora, particularly in the United States and Europe. Through a presentation of garments and accessories, paintings, photographs, decorative arts, and more, from the 18th century to today, the exhibition interprets the concept of dandyism as both an aesthetic and a strategy that allowed for new social and political possibilities. Superfine is organized into 12 sections, each representing a characteristic that defines the style, such as Champion, Respectability, Heritage, Beauty, and Cosmopolitanism. Together, these characteristics demonstrate how one’s self-presentation is a mode of distinction and resistance—within a society impacted by race, gender, class, and sexuality.”
In her 2009 interview, author Monica Miller delves into this topic in depth in her book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.
Miller shares, “By examining cultural moments and artifacts that highlight the ability of dress, especially fancy dress, to both dictate and define identity, my book examines this power struggle between masters and slaves, free blacks and whites, upper and working class blacks at key moments and locations in black diasporic history. I look at the ways in which black people, once slaves to fashion, have made fashion their slave.”
While the clothes may have been debonair, daring, and demure, the true power of the evening lay in how Black creatives reclaimed and redefined fashion—not just as adornment, but as resistance, narrative, and liberation—echoing author Monica Miller’s assertion that Black people have made fashion their slave, flipping the script on a world that once sought to costume them, now forced to reckon with their command of the stage.
Scroll through the gallery below to see some of the looks from fashion’s biggest night!
Want to take a stylish stroll down memory lane? Click here for more flashbacks to fabulous Met Gala fashion moments.
