Dressing to Disrupt: The Power of Black Dandyism

At first glance, ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ dazzles like any high-fashion exhibition. But beneath the ruffles, sequins and streetwear silhouettes lies a sharper needle – one that threads Black style through centuries of coercion, reclamation and radical self-fashioning. Black dandyism, the exhibition’s meticulous timeline shows, originated in 18th-century slaveholders’ penchant for dressing up African domestic servants in livery as conspicuous displays of their owner’s wealth. When men like Olaudah Equiano claimed their freedom, their attire was already inherently political. In his 1793 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, from which the show takes its title, Equiano recalls, ‘I laid out above eight pounds of my money for a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom.’ (The wall text notes that ‘superfine’, a real ‘grade of lightly woven wool’, was ‘then (as now) a luxury item.’)

Superfine is also a word that would hardly be out of place in the vocabulary of the many emerging designers whose work is on view alongside the historical treasures. The exhibit lavishes attention on dandyism as a staging ground for what designer Virgil Abloh termed an aesthetic of ‘maintainamorphosis’ – preserving and reinventing at once – as seen in an Abloh ensemble on view next to artist Iké Udé’s reinvented boutonnière. This stylish penchant for blending the old with the new can be misread as a direct ratification of power and hierarchy. There is a surprising section where curator Monica L. Miller takes us through early portraits of Black military officers. You can’t help but wonder: isn’t the regalia of war the opposite of the foppish lace and nosegays of the dandy? But by showing how early portraits of men like Toussaint L’Ouverture and Thomas-Alexandre Dumas imagined black men in positions of authority that were deemed unthinkable to Europeans, ‘Superfine’ explodes that false binary. The portrait of Dumas, the first French general of African descent, is paired with one of his novelist son Alexandre Dumas, and the exhibition designers have placed a pair of historical pantaloons between them. Above, a 2021–22 ensemble by Jamaican-Caymanian designer Jawara Alleyne, blends the valour of pere with the languor of fils into postmodern streetwear (complete with a de rigeur belly reveal).

The gorgeous design of the show is the handiwork of artist Torkwase Dyson, who often places historical costumes, paintings and ephemera at eye level, with eye-catchingly aspirational couture at a neck-craning height. The pointed message about ‘reach’ is delivered, but so is the desire to stand out in the crowd, to go dancing your freedom in a superfine suit. For a show about menswear, ‘Superfine’ bears the unmistakable imprint of black feminist scholars and artists such as Miller and Dyson. The cut-outs, portals and looped space in Dyson’s innovative design recall Hortense Spillers’s insistence in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987) that the black American male ‘embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself’, in part because of the denial of paternity that chattel slavery enforced, in part because of the determination of a white supremacist society to celebrate only those black men they could deem as ornamental, from the liveried servant to the black jockey dressed in his ‘racing silks’. At every turn, a dark moment in cultural history (like the racist stereotyping of freedmen as minstrel ‘Long Tail Blue’) becomes so much selvage for cutting by contemporary black tailors. While it is perhaps clichéd to extol black resilience, resistance and joy in this bleak moment in US history, the power of this exhibition comes from pointing out that these are not new strategies, but ones that have been forged in the maws of slavery, segregation and mass incarceration. From the zoot suit to sagging jeans, the show is a veritable encyclopaedia of black sartorial responses to exclusion and dehumanization.

At a moment when black history is being erased by the current Trump administration, a story as defiantly complex as the one ‘Superfine’ tells could not be timelier. Dress is a private act with public consequence, and the show lingers in those tensions. Walking through the exhibit, I felt a sense of whiplash more than once, going from the oddly intimate experience of seeing sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois’s laundry receipts alongside Diane Arbus’s cool 1961 portrait of a self-composed Stormé DeLarverie, the lesbian known for igniting the Stonewall Uprising. Or the vertigo of Pharrell’s 2025 suit for Louis Vuitton made in a fabric that is an homage to a vintage Air Afrique case once used in studio portraiture by the Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory, who posed people before an airplane backdrop in literal flights of fancy. As Europe and America seem more determined than ever to shut their doors to the Afropolitan, homages like Pharrell’s seem both defiant and plaintive. The dark side of Abloh’s ‘maintainamorphosis’, after all, is that history’s forward movement is never uncontested.

So much at least is apparent in one of the little threads the show pulls through the massive story it tells: that of the Massachusetts-born Du Bois. Widely acknowledged as the father of black studies, Du Bois appears several times in this exhibit – next to his laundry receipts is a dapper photo of him in 1900 at the Paris International, looking expectantly out towards a new century. Later in the exhibit, in a section on cosmopolitanism, we see several of his passports and travel documents, together with wall text explaining how they were revoked by the US government between 1945 and 1958 because of his outspoken radicalism. And finally, near the closing wall, there is a charming 1959 snapshot of Du Bois in New York, posed next to his granddaughter Yolanda, a Ghanaian kente wrapped over his western suit. Four years later, he would die in that West African country, having renounced his American citizenship. Here, ‘Superfine’ reminds us that dressing up has always been a way of showing up – and, when necessary, of showing out.

‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 26 October.

^{Main image: Frances Benjamin Johnston, Tailor boys at work (detail), 1899–1900. Courtesy: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Lincoln Kirstein}