The Metropolitan Museum’s latest exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, isn’t merely a parade of waistcoats and pocket squares—it’s a manifesto woven in gabardine and silk. Like a jazz improvisation over a classical score, the show syncopates 300 years of Black dandyism, from Enlightenment-era London to the cracked sidewalks of modern Harlem. Here, a frock coat isn’t just tailoring; it’s armor.
Alice Coltrane’s
hums through the galleries, turning the act of viewing into something sacred. The curation demands reverence: between a 19th-century abolitionist’s brocade vest and Tyler Mitchell’s hypermodern portraiture, the thread isn’t fabric but survival. Even the mannequins wear expressions—sculpted after anti-colonial leaders—that seem to whisper,
.
The exhibit’s compactness belies its audacity. Where 2018’s
draped Catholicism in couture, this show stitches colonialism’s wounds with gold thread. A Haitian revolutionary’s embroidered coat shares space with Virgil Abloh’s deconstructed tuxedo—both saying,
.
Certain words linger like cologne: Dapper Dan’s bootleg Louis Vuitton, Josephine Baker’s banana skirt (conspicuously absent), André Leon Talley’s cape—each a semaphore of Black joy and jeopardy. The real coup? Avoiding the trap of "diversity theater." When A$AP Rocky co-chairs the Met Gala, you know the dress code (
) is really code for: No cultural tourists allowed.
The Caribbean suit—a linen jab at Eurocentric formality—steals the finale. Designed by Ivy Ralph in the 1970s, its bare-chested defiance made British colonizers clutch their neckties. Now displayed like a treaty, it whispers:
.
This isn’t fashion history. It’s counter-history, told in buttonholes and lapels. The final vitrine holds Julius Soubise’s perfume bottles—empty, but the gallery still smells of rebellion.
