Colman Domingo was one of the highlights of the 2024 Met Gala, dressed in a stunning Calla Lily creation by Willy Chavarria. During the 2025 event, he will take on the additional role of co-chair.
Menswear has not gotten its due credit; however, it's now undergoing a renaissance on red carpets and runways alike. A historic exhibition on black suiting and sartorial codes will inspire fashion's biggest night in 2025.
In spring 2025, The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is bound to declare an exhibition titled "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style," celebrating Black dandyism from the 1700s through its revival during the Harlem Renaissance to its influence on luxury fashion today. Each Met Gala incarnation has derived its theme from the corresponding exhibition that A-listers are encouraged to interpret on the red carpet.
The theme for the newest one was "Garden of Time," based on the 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard, broached motifs of decay, beauty, and fragility—the exhibition "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" itself had garments dating back four centuries, many so fragile that they could no longer be touched or worn.
The Costume Institute also revealed new male co-chairs for the Met Gala: actors Colman Domingo, British racing driver Lewis Hamilton, rapper A$AP Rocky, and producer Pharrell Williams will help ensure the event runs smoothly alongside Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and honorary co-chair LeBron James.
This is an incisive roster of style icons who carry rich history with the Met Gala, from the dramatic white cape suit with black Calla lilies worn by Domingo last year to A$AP Rocky's thrifted quilt from the 2021 event. Williams is the men's creative director of Louis Vuitton, which co-sponsors the exhibition, and one of the many Black designers whose creations directly link dandyism with rich, exuberant collections, flamboyant details, and silhouettes challenging the limits of men's tailoring.
Hallmarks of dandyism, emerging in menswear in the 1790s in London's and Paris's formative styles, are elegance and extravagant attire, and it became the model for dressing in a flamboyant style for enslaved men. Miller's book stated that Black dandies are known for what can be termed "sartorial novelty." But dandyism has deeper roots in African aesthetics, having since emerged as an ever-revivified subculture spreading worldwide. Referring to it in a press statement, Bolton suggested that it speaks to such an influence on fashion today, pointing toward Black designers in that lineage who have injected new life into menswear.
He noted that "the emergence of various extremely gifted Black designers is at the forefront of this revitalization, perpetually challenging normative categories of identity. Though their styles are individual and unique, it is a reliance on the very tropes of the tradition of dandyism, more specifically Black dandyism, that unites them."