Met Costume Institute Announces 2025 Spring Show Theme

The Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 9 revealed that its Costume Institute’s spring 2025 show will explore the influence of Black dandyism on fashion, culture, and identity. Titled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the exhibition will feature garments and accessories from the eighteenth century through contemporary times and will run from May 10 through October 26, 2025. The show is the first the Costume Institute has devoted to menswear since 2003, when it presented “Men in Skirts.”

The figure of the Black dandy first arose in the 1900s, in Enlightenment-era Europe and endures more widely today, particularly in cosmopolitan cities such as London, New York, and Paris. Though dandyism was originally imposed on Black men as the Atlantic slave trade and conspicuous consumption gave rise to the nattily dressed servant, free and enslaved Black people swiftly deployed fashion as a signifier of power and class and used it to transform their given identities and gain new political and social opportunities.

The exhibition was inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Miller, who is chair of Africana studies at Barnard College, is curating the show alongside Andrew Bolton, chief curator of the Costume Institute; and William DeGregorio and Amanda Garfinkel, both associate curators at the institute. Research assistant Kai Marcel will assist. The exhibition will also provide the theme of the 2025 Met Gala, to be cochaired by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, with LeBron James serving as honorary chair.

“Fashion and dress have been used in a contest of power and aesthetics for Black people from the time of enslavement to the present, and dandyism has long served as a vehicle through which one can manipulate the relationship between clothing, identity, and power,” said Miller in a statement. “The history of Black dandyism illustrates how Black people have transformed from being enslaved and stylized as luxury items, acquired like any other signifier of wealth and status, to autonomous, self-fashioning individuals who are global trendsetters. This exhibition will explore concepts that define Black dandyism specifically and uncover elements of productive tension that appear when considering the figure—such as ownership, authority and self-possession, ease, exaggeration, freedom, transgression, dissonance, and spectacularity. It will also highlight the aesthetic playfulness that the dandy engenders and the ways in which sartorial experimentation gestures at both assimilation and distinction—all while telling a story about self and society.”