At the Met Gala, Dandies Owned the Night

The night before the 2019 Met Gala, British menswear designer Ozwald Boateng hosted a fashion show at Harlem’s Apollo theater to celebrate Black people’s contributions to fashion. But Boateng, whose namesake brand is known for its Savile Row tailoring in bold hues inspired by the designer’s West African heritage, was not invited to the Super Bowl of fashion.

Six years later, he landed a much-coveted seat at the table: for the first time Boateng dressed nearly 20 guests for the Met Gala, seven of whom — including Jaden Smith (in a black and white cape), musician Burna Boy (in a burgundy suit with accompanying cape) and actor Omar Sy (in a green suit with yellow button-up)— sat with the designer at a table his brand purchased.

Boateng’s robust presence at the event copacetically reflected the theme of this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibit: Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. It’s the Met’s first exhibit in 20 years centred on menswear, with a focus on the Black dandy — an elastic term that generally refers to a man displaying a colourful and ostentatious sense of style.

The exhibit is also a tacit acknowledgement and celebration of Black people’s outsized influence on tailoring and luxury fashion. Boateng, whose archival pieces are included in the exhibit, became the first Black creative director at a major French fashion house when he was appointed as men’s creative director for Givenchy in 2003. The exhibit featured work from a range of Black designers, some of whom directly followed in Boateng’s footsteps: there was the kente-style blanket from Louis Vuitton menswear by Virgil Abloh, who became the luxury giant’s menswear director in 2018, succeeded by musician Pharrell Williams (a co-chair at this year’s gala); and a military-inspired black and gold coat designed by Olivier Rousteing for Balmain.

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years,” Boateng said. “This Met Gala for me is communicating this is what I did five minutes ago, this is what I’m about to do in the next five, but I’d really like to let you know what I’ve done in the last 40.”

The red carpet’s dress code was the broader “Tailored for You,” which emphasised self-expression through suiting across cultures, leaving room for wider interpretation beyond the exhibit’s focus on Black style. Still, many of the night’s standout looks emphasised Black culture: Doechii wore a cream monogrammed Louis Vuitton suit with a burgundy pussy bow, matching shoes and a teased-out Afro; Teyana Taylor arrived in burgundy cape and a matching du-rag, designed by two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer Ruth Carter.

Though the Costume Institute announced the theme last October, months before President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the focus on Black style felt particularly impactful given the current political climate, where companies are under pressure to roll back their diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. There was routine backlash at the notion of an event highlighting rich celebrities in priceless couture — Jack Schlossberg, the grandson of President John F. Kennedy and former Vogue contributor, for example, announced his plans to boycott the event on social media.

While displaying exorbitantly-priced garments in a museum does not change the current political reality, highlighting Black creativity on fashion’s biggest night is something of a rebellion. It’s one that paid off — this year’s gala raised a record-breaking $31 million, the Met’s chief executive, Max Hollein, said at a press preview on Monday.

“We’re living in an interesting time in our political history. Anything we can do at the museum to stand behind the Black community is of utmost focus,” Anna Wintour, Met Gala co-chair and Vogue editor-in-chief, said on Monday night.

Respecting Cultural Boundaries

Heading into the Met Gala this year, the biggest question was whether the many non-Black guests would veer into culturally insensitive territory. The fashion industry has a long history of exclusion — still today, most of the creative directors of major luxury houses are white men — and cultural appropriation. Would the looks that graced the steps at the Met mirror the arguably parasitic relationship between high fashion and Black culture?

This year’s red carpet theme “Tailored for You,” however, felt loose enough to accommodate the many non-Black attendees who peacocked for photographers on the famous stairs. Those participants had a choice of how much they wanted to play into the social politics underlining the exhibit. Many wore a variation of a suit, including Zendaya, Sabrina Carpenter and Kylie and Kendall Jenner. Some played with the masculine and feminine divide: Emma Chamberlain wore a body-hugging, backless pinstripe suit dress with a peak lapel while Charli XCX was in a feathered backless waistcoat. Others embraced the theatricality of the dandy: Madonna, for example, showed up in a cream tuxedo by Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford, smoking a cigar.

The approach was reminiscent of the 2015 Met Gala, focused on Chinese influence in fashion. Similarly, there were prior worries over potential cultural appropriation, but it ended up being more celebratory as guests like Sarah Jessica Parker, Lady Gaga and Rihanna turned up in tastefully crafted headdresses and looks from Chinese designers.

Many of the night’s biggest stars stuck to the established brands: Rihanna revealed her baby bump in a tailoring-inspired Miu Miu dress; Cynthia Erivo wore a red, silver and gold-embellished Givenchy by Sarah Burton gown; and Tracee Ellis Ross ascended the Met steps in an oversized purple and pink suit, replete with a pink cumberbow, by Marc Jacobs. Several major brands, however, appeared to be absent from the red carpet, including Loewe, Gucci, Fendi and Bottega Veneta (though that could be explained by their current period of creative transition).

But Black designers were more present on the carpet than they had ever been before. Halle Berry wore a mesh and black LaQuan Smith gown, while Lewis Hamilton (a co-chair) wore a cream top coat and embellished beret by Grace Wales Bonner and Diana Ross made an appearance in a trailing white feathered cape by emerging designer Ugo Mozie. Nick Jonas wore a cream embellished top with black trousers by British designer Bianca Saunders, who blended structural tailoring and draping as a nod to the late André Leon Talley, Vogue’s former editor-at-large. Saunders, who made her Met Gala debut in 2023, said putting a look together for guests across races and ethnicities shows the universal reach of independent Black brands.

For “Black designers, anyone can tap into their brand … people think that certain cultures or certain communities only make for a small amount and we’re not global,” Saunders said. “We know a lot about being able to dress multiple cultures and make them feel the way that we feel when we wear our clothes.”

Bringing the Text to Life

In both the exhibit and on the Met’s stairs, designers’ interpretations of the Black Dandy traversed centuries of Black style across the diaspora — from British designer Nicholas Daley’s take on the Jamaican Kariba safari-style suit displayed in the exhibit to American menswear designer Davidson Petit-Frère’s nods to Harlem Renaissance and the 1989 comedy “Harlem Nights” starring Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy in a top coat and cane worn by Russell Wilson. Accessories also tied the historical with the modern: stars like Taraji P. Henson, musician Shaboozey and supermodel Anok Yai mixed tail coats, canes and grillz.

In her book and source text for the exhibit, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity”, guest curator Monica L. Miller traces the evolution of the Black dandy from American slavery, where some male slaves were forced to wear fine tailoring, to the irreverent flashiness of Black pop cultural icons like hip-hop stars A$AP Rocky (a co-chair this year) and André 3000 (a member of this year’s gala host committee) as well as Talley, whose regalia is omnipresent in the exhibit from the Louis Vuitton trunks that bore his initials to a bespoke caftan rendered in a black, orange and yellow tribal print.

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is broken up into 12 sections that home in on core elements of Black dandyism, inspired by a 1934 essay by Zora Neale Hurston, including ownership (19th century velvet livery coats); respectability (a black brushed wool tailcoat worn by Frederick Douglass); beauty (a white polyester jacquard ruffle shirt worn by Prince); and cool (a mink-collared leather jacket in LV prints by Dapper Dan).

The exhibit also put a spotlight on independent Black designers past and present, including Dapper Dan, Wales Bonner and Telfar Clemens, who have operated in and outside of the mainstream fashion system. On the carpet, a new generation of Black brands made their mark — from Sergio Hudson dressing 20 guests including fashion tech entrepreneur John Imah to Who Decides War dressing Academy Award winner Regina King and musician Jazmine Sullivan for her first Met Gala appearance.

The outsized presence of independent brands at the Met Gala was particularly notable as the fate of luxury upstarts are threatened by the ubiquity of conglomerates, a sector-wide slowdown and the imposition of higher tariffs. Against that tumultuous backdrop, Ozwald Boateng’s ability to buy a table (with a starting price of $350,000) with the help of a few of his A-list clientele, is a victory in and of itself.

For Black designers, “we’re not independent by choice. We’re independent because we have to be, because a lot of times we’re not [seen as] investible by backers,” said Sergio Hudson. But Hudson believes that the indie designers will leave a mark as resonant as the fashion giants.

“What you will definitely see from me is my heart and soul in every garment that walks the carpet … and I believe all of my contemporaries are going to step up to the plate as well.”