It’s probably too much to show up at one of these Costume Institute shows looking for the object that ties the whole thing together. Just because they’re about clothes doesn’t mean they have to do what a smart outfit does. And yet damn if I didn’t find a single object in this year’s installment that accomplishes just that, an et voilà piece that not only brings off the show itself but explains the courage that clothes have lent a people, a people who often weren’t meant — in the lands that either enslaved them or bankrolled their enslavement — to possess either: power or clothes, at least not the good ones.
So here’s to “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the institute’s 2025 edition, nestled within the flowing space of the Cantor Exhibition Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and dreamed up and curated by the scholar Monica L. Miller, with Andrew Bolton, who heads the Costume Institute. Are the galleries done in solemn gunmetal tones? They are. Is that title academically ambiguous? ’Fraid so. But it’s luminous and vital anyway. It understands the particular significance of most of its objects and where to situate them for maximal emotional bang.
Three hundred years of garments, accessories and sartorial ideas, paintings, videos, sketches and cartoons, get-ups from recent collections by super brands with Black stewardship (Louis Vuitton menswear, Balmain) and comparatively newish Black designers (L’Enchanteur, Bstroy, Wales Bonner, Denzil Patrick) have all been assembled and meticulously arranged into 12-part themes, a structure that borrows quite loosely from Zora Neale Hurston’s delightfully asserted taxonomy, from 1934, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The themes (“Distinction,” “Jook,” “Cool,” “Heritage,” for starters) are arranged into a chronology that weds a history of fashion to the evolution of the African diaspora. We’re talking hundreds of pieces — shoes, coats, scarves, jewelry, luggage, happy-plantation-painted buttons, whole outfits on strapping onyx mannequins, not to mention The Hair, complete with so many side and middle parts that Moses had to be the barber) — all in a space whose open floor can narrow into alleys that land you in startling proximity to the unexpected.
That’s how I found my banger. I had made my way into the “Ownership” section that began my route through the show (no one says you have to obey the path of the themes, but it does culminate in a story that rewards adherence). It includes a case holding a 300-year-old livery waistcoat in tender lavender silk alongside a cropped number in tan wool so stiff with age that, at this point, it looks as heavy as a travertine slab. A child had worn it. Each section situates the historical garments near a contemporary counterpart. In “Ownership,” one such connection involved encasing those waistcoats below a double-breasted Balmain suit with gold-covered effects.
The invitation comes early to savor a distinctly unsavory truth: that such children would have been an adornment, adorned. On an enslaved person, particularly a boy, Western finery aroused laughter. Eventually, an elegantly attired Black person could seem risible, to a white eye (or an eye trained to see whitely) — not clothed so much as costumed. A meaty section devoted to blackface-minstrel-era caricatures underscores the alleged comedy, and the comedy begins with fashionable clothes — sometimes dated — on ink-black figures with puffed out chests. froggy legs and paddle feet.
And it was just about there, on the thematic border between “Disguise” and “Freedom,” that my heart began to race, my thoughts quickened. An argument was coming into focus — the show’s. I mean, this thing could have gotten by on implication, that clothes on Black people had been a gag that the maligned transfigured into success, by way of mold-melters like Ozwald Boateng and Virgil Abloh, André Leon Talley and Iké Udé (the latter three are in heavy rotation throughout the show; Udé’s credited as a consultant). But the wealth of imagery and wall text and theme gathers force.
Those caricatures, for instance, land in the “Freedom” section, whose historical objects hail from the 19th century. On one wall is a six-portrait gallery of Black gentlemen (some named, some unknown; same with the artists). They sit with nobility and, in an instance or two, with attitude, flair, nerve, one stratospherically arched brow. At least two strike a pose new to my decades of standing before portraiture: the dangled arm. They’re sitting so that a limb hangs behind the chair. I laughed. I laughed because it’s alway funny to rediscover how signifyingly Black we African Americans have always been. Those arms look at liberty.
But the longer I stood there and stared at these men, I noticed something else — not the banger, not yet; give me a moment. In the vicinity of this dignified sextet sits a garment called a stock. It stands long, stiff and high as it cuffs the neck; often the collar points are turned up and you’d tie an ascot around it. All six of these men are depicted wearing one. It lends regency, but I found myself wondering very particularly about comfort., Those U.F.O. ruffled neck rings (they’re called ruffs) that one finds in, say, the portraiture of Frans Hals came to mind. A ruffed neck floats looks guillotined, it resembles a ready-to-serve roast. Likewise, on a Black 19th-century neck, a stock conveys torture. (You’d secure one with buckles and straps.) You notice the grip of a virtuous detail like that, how the head rests atop it, and you also think “vise.” An arched eyebrow, then, transmits enhanced defiance. Again, “Freedom” is where we are here.
That section shares a permeable border with its neighbor, “Respectability.” And I laughed again, because you can feel the show succeeding at narrowing an ancient tension over presentation within Black culture down to a matter of garments. A respectable appearance never guaranteed respect. A respectable appearance seemed to invite a certain disrespect. But for a long while, to this day perhaps, presentation is what a Black American had in lieu of policy. The clothes became a politics.
So it was moving to be able to study one of W.E.B. Du Bois’s laundry tickets and feel, at last, equal to a legend in the single arena of fastidiousness. A detail like that doesn’t simply humanize. It poignantly regularizes, makes him newly real.
I was making my way from “Freedom” into that adjacent realm of respectability — my eyes peering anew, having taken in scores and scores of images and objects, knowing full well about the accompanying 371-page, 100-ton catalog, and having considered for a thousandth time the profound significance of Black Americans being able to wear more than fabrics that could make even a potato weep — when I found The Garment.
It rests in a case within eyeshot of 20th-century suiting by Jeffrey Banks and sexy outfits (by Polo, no less), and so there’s a world in which I drift right past it, past the case with Frederick Douglass’s tailcoat.
Now, I know: I dragged you all this way, down one cul-de-sac after the next, for a coat? I can explain. Frederick Douglass’s tailcoat, in black brushed wool, stands in a vitrine alongside his other effects: the gold, leashed pocket watch he adored; a pair of shades and levitating top hat; a cane, white vest and matching ban-collar shirt whose bib is monogrammed, in script, with the tiniest red “D.” There’s a comb that’s poignantly minuscule considering the plumes this man was working with. In all: A hero’s kit.
The tailcoat sits on an invisible mount. So it seems to float. Too many of the clothes in the show — in most Costume Institute shows, in fact — stand on nosebleed shelving that deny sufficient appreciation. (Bring a ladder.) But Douglass’s coat is just about perfectly scaled. And what you notice about it is its wide diameter. The distance from the back to the front could pass for a canyon. The capaciousness of the cavity his body leaves in absence is something to behold.
Douglass, we know, was one of the most photographed people of the 19th century. It’s the voice, however, blasting from a mouth that in those pictures is closed. We’ve had to imagine how, for decades, it decried enslavement. It’s the voice that helped elevate him, formerly enslaved himself, to the pantheon of the century’s extraordinary figures, that made him as much a founding father as the country’s official sires. No known recordings exist of it; you can, however, read plenty about the skin his oratory pimpled, the pulses it spiked, the minds it pried open. So if the invisible mount’s proportions are to be believed (and I’m choosing to believe them, to believe in them, in the myth they inspire), the coat’s cavity makes evident the power of what we’ll never hear.
This garment is evidence of the galvanic force of his oratory, which was a weapon of what back then they called moral suasion. Hovering like that it seemed armored and somehow alive. How big, I wondered, was this man’s chest? His lungs? His heart? A garment like that explains a crucial aspect of fashion. A garment like that explains why they didn’t want us to have any access to it.
I’VE FAILED TO MENTION what this show is actually about. They’ve called it “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” But its animating impulse stems from this idea of dandyism. The dandy is a gentlemen, from the 18th and 19th century, who delights in the cultivation of personal style. If clothes talk, the dandy is a chatterbox. A Black dandy begins as a joke that white people enjoyed telling and Black people repossessed and remixed. A Black dandy chatters out the side of his mouth, under his breath, with his whole face. A Black Dandy is any Black person with the nerve to dress to impress. Well, almost. There’s plenty of function to dandyism. But there’s also an element of frippery, frolic, foolishness.
Miller adapted Superfine, more or less, from her book, from 2009, “Slave to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of the Black Diasporic Identity.” (There was no way the Met was calling this show that.) And what’s impressive about that spatially narrowing stretch, where the chronology runs from the American antebellum age to the start of the 20th century, where the gallery floor expands, is how it clearly, yet quietly permits you to see how dandyism rebelled against respectability (and therefore against churchliness), against the idea that “proper” attire was the sole key to advancement. Douglass’s tailcoat feels like a gateway between approaches. After him, style seems freer, too.
Not every piece in the show constitutes what strikes me as dandyism. Were the Black Panthers dandies? They were sharp, obviously, but they were minimalists. Their leathers and noirs are here mostly in contemporary reconsiderations that, tellingly, exist on an island among the show’s themed areas — is this “Disguise,” “Ownership,” “Heritage”? Here, they seem (as much of the show does) queer: a state of being that dandyism enhances as both a form of expression and the resistance to conditions, to being conditioned. To that end, André Leon Talley, the fashion journalist and creative auteur, reasonably operates like a talisman throughout the show. Yet maybe it’s too reliant upon his relentless gumption, too obligated to showcase to it.
One of the more inspired ideas in “Superfine” entails what athletes have worn (“Champions”). Much of that section is devoted to young jockeys, the sports heroes of the day, stars — until Jim Crow helped banish Black riders from the sport. Standing there, in front of the boxing shorts and the jockey’s breeches and silk tops, I actually whispered, “Daddy…” Yes, I could’ve meant some gay guy with an outsize foxiness. But I was referring to my actual father, Arnold Wesley Morris, a sprinter and track coach who, with his mesh tops under double-breasted blazers, short-shorts and loafers, shades and a cherry-on-top baseball cap, could’ve been in this show. Daddy, you were a dandy!
I will admit that before that Douglass vitrine, Superfine had been feeling a bit notional. I had been craving more “for examples,” which, I know, is a lofty ask for a project whose reach predates the photograph. But every time you get an image like the one Diane Arbus took of the drag performer and Stonewall Riot warrior, Stormé DeLarverie or Andy Levin’s photo of the jazz and blues great “Uncle Lionel” Batiste, captured with cash leaking from one of his suits, you’re greedy for even further proof. These are clothes that demand a sidewalk or a stadium tunnel — you want more reminders of the dandies of the WNBA, from standup and hip-hop. But an intelligence is at work here; it’s playful, connective, bright-siding. It maybe trusts that that tailcoat of Douglass can do a lot of work, opening this show up and out.
Now, it’d be crazy to say that this man bellowed and inveighed and endangered himself so that the zoot-suiter could stroll; and Harold and Fayard Nicholas could throw on tuxes then, over and over, leap 10 feet in the air then land in a split; so that Prince could spend “Purple Rain” in that pearly white Little Lord Fauntleroy shirt; or Sylvester could make geometry of a sequined blazer. But there’s something about the sight of all that diameter, all of its capacity that says for every sweater, sneaker, sweatsuit, jacket or pair of jeans presented in Douglass’s wake, amazement is possible, life is possible. You don’t leave Superfine wondering if anybody has the nerve, the daring, the vision, the diction to fill a single shoe. The question is, who on Earth could fit that coat?
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
May 10 — Oct. 26, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave., Manhattan, 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.
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