Black Dandyism and the Power of Fashion

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Spring 2025 exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” examines fashion through the lens of Black dandyism. Drawing from Monica L. Miller’s book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, the exhibition — guest curated by Miller — formed the basis for this year’s dazzling Met Gala, themed: “Tailored for You.”

The May 5 red carpet affair was co-chaired by Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour, with LeBron James as an honorary chair.

The evening was spectacular by any measure, and a success, raising a record $31 million for the Costume Institute, which relies on donations for its operating budget. But it’s also important not to let the glitz and glamour of the Met Gala obscure the roots of the fashion legacy that the exhibition explores. Before there was Domingo or Hamilton, A$AP or Pharrell, dandyism was explored by Black intellectuals and creatives like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois who used their dress to reach beyond the bounds of fashion to shape an aesthetic movement and a political moment.

Douglass’ insights into the power of clothing as recounted in his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, help to better understand the origins of Black dandyism and his own style.

“Their yearly clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts, one pair of linen trousers, like the shirts, one jacket, one pair of trousers for winter, made of coarse negro cloth, one pair of stockings, and one pair of shoes; the whole of which could not have cost more than seven dollars,” he wrote of the meager clothing supply provided to enslaved men and women. Children, he wrote, only received “two coarse linen shirts per year.”

“I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the country. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave on the plantation,” he wrote. “He is much better fed and clothed, and enjoys privileges altogether unknown to the slave on the plantation. There is a vestige of decency, a sense of shame, that does much to curb and check those outbreaks of atrocious cruelty so commonly enacted upon the plantation.”

The phenomenon that Douglass identifies here gets at the history of dandyism that Miller describes in Slaves to Fashion, in which she writes that Black dandyism can be traced back to Black men and boys being viewed as “luxury items” dressed in suits for both public and private display by European slave owners in the 18th century. It is from a desire to subvert this imposed dress that Black dandyism took root. Though Douglass is referencing a more modern and American presentation of forced dress — he was sent to Baltimore in 1826 at the age of eight — his point still captures the notion of clothing as a tool used to assert and maintain power. That helps us better understand why the reclamation of dandyism by Black men was a radical shift in the cultural and political spheres. It was a choice in style that went far beyond being in vogue: it was an aesthetic, philosophical, and literal opposition to the stereotypes and dehumanization embedded in America’s perception of black identity.

 

Few portraits in U.S. history garner the same level of recognition as a photograph of Douglass. As the most photographed American in the 19th century, Douglass understood the weight of visibility and perception. In each photo, for which he was known to style himself, he is stoic and sharply dressed in a suit. His visible sophistication and pride in appearance — along with his vision of dress as influence — has resulted in Douglass being considered one of America’s earliest Black dandies. A tailcoat, top hat, and vest worn by Douglass will be featured in the Met exhibition, according to an article published by Barnard College, where Miller teaches.  

Similarly to Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois found there was immense power in how one presented themselves to the world. In addition to his essays and novels that examine the relationship between style, race, masculinity, and power, Du Bois also curated the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, compiling more than 350 photos of well-to-do Black Americans in an effort to quash stereotypes formed around “conventional American ideas.”

The upcoming Met exhibition is broken down into 12 sections that are inspired by Zora Neal Hurston’s essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”: Ownership, Presence, Distinction, Disguise, Freedom, Champion, Respectability, Jook, Heritage, Beauty, Cool, and Cosmopolitanism.

Both Douglass and Du Bois will be represented within the “Respectability” section because they “have long understood grooming and dress as tools of power and distinction,” according to the museum’s press release for the exhibition. 

The marriage of visual identity and social perception is essential to understanding Black dandyism as stylistic, cultural, historical, sociological, and philosophical. Transcendent and subversive, it is both a celebration of identity and a dissent against the violence under which it was born. 

“In a world in which the fluidity and mobility of African and African American cultural and aesthetic forms — style — constitute what can be called a major part of ‘black cultural traffic,’ one needs a facility with the language of image and identity that one can increasingly speak in and through,” writes Miller. “The black dandy embodies and articulates this language, its complexities, and its futurity. The past, present, and future of this style will be our style, for many years to come.”

“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” runs from May 10 to October 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.