The Met Gala is always something of a performance art spectacle. The 2025 edition was no different. What was unique was that it sought to celebrate not just clothes or ideas, but an entire culture. The Met Gala stepped outside the typical focus on couture womenswear to highlight men’s tailoring and the Black dandy as a historical figure.
But what is a dandy, exactly? A dandy is, simply, someone with an all-encompassing devotion to fashion, style and tidiness. Society has called these people fussy, or in more recent times, metrosexual. But the crucial element of dandyism is its antagonism toward class, race and sexual boundaries. This is especially crucial for Black people, who have and continue to use the trappings of fashion to signal success, self-worth and pride. That pride is, at many times throughout history, a subversive act.
In the introduction to her book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” Monica L. Miller (who was a guest curator for the accompanying exhibition at the Costume Institute) says that “Black dandyism has always been practiced by those interested in much more than materialism and the latest style.” She goes on to say that dandyism is a “truly radical kind of freedom, accessible perhaps only through a constant, playful, yet studied change of clothes.” It is, as she says, both appropriation of the trappings of the upper class and a challenge to the order they’ve subjected the world to.
“Slaves to Fashion” is a dense book, filled with history and reference. It looks back at the novelty of slaves wearing finely tailored clothes, which it connects to the explosion of Blackness and queerness in the Harlem Renaissance. The thesis (and ultimate challenge) of the book is drawing a straight line between an enslaved Black child in elaborate clothes far beyond his station in life to a modern hip-hop celebrity like Andre 3000. To Miller, both the slave and the star are examples of Black identity and masculinity transcending the boundaries and barriers set up around them by society. Blackness itself becomes a performance, a concept invented by those who sought to turn Africans into an other. And a performance almost always requires the appropriate uniform.
While the theme of this Gala might have leaned more toward men, that didn’t prevent women from finding a way to creatively connect to it, as the dandy’s role is to perform an exaggerated form of masculinity — twisted, contorted and pumped. Zendaya’s creamy white Louis Vuitton suit popped for its elegant, understated tailoring. Doechii, also rocking Vuitton, went for a more outre LV-monogrammed suit and trouser shorts with a maroon bow tie. Wide shoulder pads on Alton Mason, Doja Cat, Lupita N’yongo and Teyana Taylor recalled the broad, hyper-male suits one might see on a Sunday trip to church.
And then there were the hats. Whoopi Goldberg’s Thom Browne outfit was punctuated by a hat that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Victorian-era dandy intellectual. Singer and actor Janelle Monáe’s Thom Browne fit included a contrasting color suit, hat, monocle and cape adorned with the outline of a totally different suit splashed across it. Multiple suits, to be exact — a pinstripe and a plain navy blazer with white piping. It was a Russian nesting doll of menswear, with allusions to every tool in Browne’s prodigious toolbox of suiting. This is masculinity as posturing, as provocation and as protection. Presenting masculine symbols while tweaking them or reappropriating them is a potent subversion of the norm.
The Met Gala — a lavish, invite-only party that gathers the most famous people in the world for one night to raise money for the arts — is far from subversive. Instead, it’s a worldwide announcement about who matters most, who is affecting society most deeply, and who has the money to attend. It is inherently about the establishment. The men wearing the luxurious suits Monday were not breaking class barriers. The clothes on display were not accessible to the masses. In many cases, the outfits were bespoke, custom and never to be replicated.
But it would be too easy to dismiss the Met as some sort of “Hunger Games”-like spectacle of wealth. The idea of Black dandyism goes beyond extreme displays of status. It means that you care — about how you look, but also about yourself. In an interview with GQ about the Met, legendary designer Dapper Dan described how he became a dandy. “I’m from the poorest neighborhood in Harlem, right by the banks of the Harlem River. Everybody in my little enclave was all poor. We had rats and roaches. Goodwill was our Macy’s. Whenever I was lucky and fortunate enough to have something to wear, I went to 125th Street. Nobody went there who wasn’t dressed. At 125th Street, nobody knew I had rats, nobody knew I had roaches, and that for me was the birth of dandyism because I saw the power of transformation that could take place with your clothes.”
This year’s Met Gala theme allowed the spectator to think not just of the clothes, but what those clothes mean to them and to the wearer. To dress up is to project power, possibility and preeminence. A Black person dressing up for church can reclaim their place in the cultural hierarchy as much as a hip-hop star uses clothes to signal their wealth. The table sponsored by Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God label spotlighted Black celebrities as disparate as filmmaker Ryan Coogler and artists Amy Sherald and Lauren Halsey. Their outfits, many of them custom by the house, were as challenging and avant-garde as anything the fashion establishment has to offer. Coogler and actor Adrien Brody both wore broad-shouldered suits paired with T-shirts and more formalist cummerbunds — a house style of Fear of God. As always, Lorenzo is more than happy to muss up the expected, to push the boundaries while still respecting the core traditions of the art form.
What defines dandyism is a willingness to play by a set of rules, whatever those might be for the time and temperature of the world around it. While the celebrities in these clothes aren’t explicitly transgressive figures, their presence in this world of high status is in a sense a form of transgression. Their mere existence in a place like the Met Gala signals that there is a sliver of an opening to greatness, no matter how small it might look in the moment. There will always be that spirit of Dapper Dan at Goodwill to hold on to, and that style is not about how much the clothes cost, but what it says about the person wearing them.
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