Black Male Beauty, Respectability in All Its Complexity at the Met

The Washington Post / Robin Givhan

16:46 JST, May 4, 2025

NEW YORK – Among the many objects that tell the story of the Black dandy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” are the tailcoat, hat and sunglasses of Frederick Douglass. The black coat is sober and distinguished, but the signs of wear create a delicate jacquard-like pattern on its lining. The hat, too, is well-worn, shifting from lush black to threadbare tan around the brim. The sunglasses, which are not prescription, are a specific stylish gesture. Because style matters.

These historical garments, once owned by the most photographed man of the 19th century, share gallery space with a custom suit in gray and burgundy windowpane plaid made for the influential fashion editor André Leon Talley – one of the most visible Black men in 20th century fashion. It sits alongside a maroon and white collegiate ensemble that marked a 21st century collaboration between Morehouse College and Polo Ralph Lauren, one that offered new insights into what it means to look American and to be celebrated as such.

All of these garments are meditations on respectability, which is one of the chapters in the story of the Black dandy.

What is a dandy? According to guest curator Monica L. Miller, a dandy is someone who “studies above all else to dress elegantly and fashionably.” A dandy dresses with discrete intentions and uses style as a negotiation of identity. A dandy is acutely aware of the many eyes focused on him, including those of onlookers as he passes by, as well as his own eyes as he catches his reflection in a mirror.

Black dandies know “clothing has power. They understand racial hierarchy and gender hierarchy. They adjust that knowledge to the circumstances that they’re in,” Miller said. “Knowing can provide actual liberation – from enslavement to freedom to being who you are.”

In his style and carriage, a dandy can be an expression of cool, of independence, of heritage and beauty. Miller explores those facets and others in “Superfine,” an exhibition that is both well-timed and a long time in coming. It celebrates the complexity of attire, as worn, personalized and enlivened by Black men. Central to her investigation is the concept of respectability, which is tinged with both empowerment and capitulation.

In “Superfine,” respectable clothing includes a stark white tailored suit by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton. Abloh was the first Black American to helm a French legacy brand. The suit speaks to the establishment in a familiar, acceptable vernacular. But that same pristine garment is draped with black and white kente cloth with LV insignia. It lovingly follows a man’s individual contours, allowing him to delight in his unique, glamorous self. In the exhibition catalogue, respectability echoes in the soft-focus photography of Tyler Mitchell, with its hints of James van der Zee’s dignity and Gordon Parks’s cool. Mitchell casts loving eyes on the gray-bearded educator Grailing King who poses in pinstripes that give him a powerful and confident physique. Mitchell gives thoughtful consideration to young actor Aaron Kingsley Adetola, who’s dressed up in bedazzled suiting by Grace Wales Bonner.

The show’s mannequins, created by artist Tanda Francis, with their broad noses and full lips, evoke the essence of Black men from across the diaspora. The ebony-hued figures command attention, whether draped in the teal and green sequins of Theophilio, the exaggerated shoulders of Raul Lopez’s blazer or the delicate lace of Kenneth Nicholson.

“Superfine” tells viewers that respectability is many things, ever-changing. It is ageless. It’s personal bravado, an armor used to navigate hostile spaces or a form of camouflage so that a man can go about his business without attracting resistance. Respectability is a learning curve of stylish ingenuity.

The objects speak to all those possibilities but never forget the sweep of Black male beauty. To be clear, masculinity in its many iterations is on full display. So are strength and virility. Yet humming below each declaration about what it means to be a dandy, is the sheer beauty of the garments and the men who have chosen and who choose to wear them. The ability to make that choice, whether in the 19th century or in the 21st, to have the time, wherewithal and mindset to extend that tender gift of self-adoration to themselves can be breathtaking.

“Superfine” is the first Costume Institute exhibition in 20 years that focuses on menswear. It’s the first one that places Black style, as well as Black designers, at center stage. And while it’s an exhibition that’s been incubating since 2020 when the country awakened to racial justice failures during the summer of George Floyd’s murder, it opens at the precise moment that the country’s cultural institutions are under governmental assault for exploring and uplifting the stories of those who stand in the minority. As the White House tries to erase Blackness from the American narrative, the Costume Institute, sensitive to its past blind spots and oversights, exalts Blackness – the specificity of it, as well as its universality. It joins other museums in meeting this moment with simple but powerful rejoinders. Black visual artists such as Amy Sherald, Adam Pendleton, Jack Whitten and Rashid Johnson are all the subject of solo exhibitions. And Torkwase Dyson designed the gallery space for “Superfine.”

“I think this is exactly the moment we should be having these conversations. We should always be having these conversations,” said Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator-in-charge. “The show itself is not controversial. … The controversy is what people bring to it.”

Bolton conceived the show while working with young Black designers for an exhibition on American fashion that opened in the fall of 2021 and was struck by how many of them were “historically-minded.” And then Talley died in 2022, and Bolton noted the language used to describe the role clothing played in people’s understanding of Talley and the way in which the southern-born editor, who navigated racism and isolation, moved through the world. Those disparate events led him to “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” a 2009 academic tome written by Miller. That book was essentially transformed into this exhibition.

“It’s her work. It’s her research. Nobody knows this work more than Monica,” Bolton said. “She’s the world expert on this.”

In the weeks before the exhibition opens to the public May 10 and before Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky and a host of Black designers, actors and artists pivot and pose on the Met Gala’s grand staircase, Miller, a Barnard professor, was in the subterranean spaces of the Costume Institute, surrounded by archival images, look book pictures and photographs of studiously elegant and self-aware men. The subject of Black male dress has indeed been her life’s work, a subject she began to explore in 1994 as a graduate student at Harvard University.

“I was taking a class with Cornel West and we were reading ‘The Souls of Black Folk,’ and Cornel was treating it like a sermon,” she recalled. The book was written by W.E.B. Du Bois, a celebrated thinker of the era, who referred to the Black leadership class as the “talented tenth.” “I came across a footnote that talked about him being caricatured as a dandy, and how furious he was about it. And I was like, wow, what I knew about him at the time was that he was just like Frederick Douglass: a quote, unquote race man, somebody for whom public presentation was incredibly important. For both of them, as one of the few Black people that got the ear of anybody, there was a way in which they had to look to be heard.”

Du Bois “looked good to me, like why is he upset about being a dandy? And then I did a little bit of research and realized that he was reacting to something that was more present for him, which was the dandy figure in the blackface minstrel show,” Miller continued. “He was reacting to being potentially caricatured – reacting to his fashion, erudition, comportment, manner, all of those things being exaggerated and denigrated.”

Black men have always been on guard. They had to be. Yet fashion was also a way of amplifying their voice when it was deliberately muted or readily ignored. It was freeing and invigorating.

“Douglass knew he had to dress in a way that was going to make it possible for him to be heard,” Miller said. “The most photographed man in the 19th century clearly understood that there is a way that he had to appear not only in person but in images that would convey a Black fitness for citizenship and his own ability to be a representative of Black people to Black people. So it’s not always about a White audience. Sometimes it is about an intra-racial audience in terms of instilling that particular kind of confidence.”

In other words, Black folks dress for other Black folks in a kind of call-and-response. In the width of a lapel, the flow of trackpants, the colorway of Air Jordans, there are whispers of history, references to backstories, shared aspirations and the familiarity of what it means to show up and show out. And be seen.

“When I was a kid, I shined my dad’s shoes. That was one of my chores,” Miller recalled. “My dad wore a uniform to work. He was not a person who was wearing those shoes all the time. But those shoes were really important. When he had to have them, they needed to be right.”

“I want people to come in and see dads, brothers, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, community members,” she said. “I want them to see aspects of the ways in which they approached their style.”

And Miller is delighted their style, in all of its nuances and flourishes, will be given its due respect on fashion’s grandest stage.