This year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had the daunting task of looking at three centuries of Black fashion through the lens of dandyism, revealing how tailoring and design have shaped Black identity across the Atlantic diaspora. Located in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style delivers a sharply curated, multi-century meditation on Black dandyism as aesthetic, identity, and resistance. Curated by Andrew Bolton, this year he was joined by guest curator, Monica L. Miller, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and prompts from her 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Across an ocean of understanding, one thing is clear—black style has been the forward-facing expression of joy and pain, pride and sorrow, rhythm and blues. A connecting language when faces were familiar, but tongues were unclear. Framed through the lens of dandyism, the exhibition takes a clearer path toward understanding how tailored menswear maps out Black identity, literally and metaphorically, across Atlantic histories of subjugation and self-fashioning.

With an exhibition space created by artist Torkwase Dyson, looks come alive from Grace Wales Bonner’s cowrie-adorned, crushed velvet suit to James Jeter’s Morehouse look for Polo by Ralph Lauren to Virgil Abloh’s brass-laced three-piece, serving not just as material culture but as vessels of autonomy and assertion. With fulfilling precision, the show links 18th-century colonial livery that can be hard to face, yet essential to understand connections to contemporary design vocabularies like Ozwald Boateng, Martine Rose, Bianca Saunders, Agbobly, 3.PARADIS, Theophilio, Jawara Alleyne, and countless others. Fused with scholarly focus on how political clothing can be, cultural leaders, like W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, highlight how grooming and dress were power tools of distinction. And one would be remiss to forget to mention the legendary catalyst for the conversation, the late André Leon Talley, whose Morty Sills and Jeffrey Banks suits anchor the show’s tribute to Black fashion’s towering tastemakers—those who understood that style could both disrupt and dignify.