Today, Vogue announced that the theme for the 2025 Costume Institute show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”. 

The show takes inspiration from Monica L Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, in which she explores the figure of the Black dandy.

According to Vogue, the exhibit will feature “garments, paintings, photographs, and more – all exploring the indelible style of Black men in the context of dandyism, from the 18th-century through present day” and “illustrate how Black people transformed from being enslaved and stylized as luxury items, acquired like any other signifier of wealth and status, to autonomous self-fashioning individuals who are global trendsetters.” 

Ahead of the announcement, guest curator Miller described Black dandyism as “a strategy and a tool to rethink identity, to reimagine the self in a different context. To really push a boundary—especially during the time of enslavement, to really push a boundary on who and what counts as human, even.”

It will be the first Costume Institute exhibition since 2003’s “Men in Skirts” to focus exclusively on menswear, and the first since Andrew Bolton became Curator in Charge to involve a guest curator. 

“I feel that the show itself marks a really important step in our commitment to diversifying our exhibitions and collections, as well as redressing some of the historical biases within our curatorial practice,” Bolton told Vogue. “It’s very much about making fashion at The Met more of a gateway to access and inclusivity.” In the wake of the surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, roughly 150 pieces by POC designers have been acquired by the Costume Institute, some of which feature in “Superfine.” 

“What’s interesting about Black dandyism is it’s not just an identity,” Bolton continued. “Obviously, you have people like Iké Udé, the photographer and artist who self-identifies as a dandy [Udé is serving as Special Consultant to the exhibition], but it’s also a concept as well [...] I think a lot of Black designers today are exploring the different modalities that the Black dandy represents—things like freedom, dissonance, theatricality.”