The Met’s Next Costume Fashion Blockbuster Take On the Politics of Race

The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.

On Wednesday, the museum announced that its spring 2025 blockbuster fashion show will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” focusing on the history of the Black dandy and the way peacocking goes beyond aesthetics to empowerment. ASAP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will be co-chairs of the gala that opens the show; LeBron James will be the honorary chair.

The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its own historic failures in diversity and inclusion, said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge.

“I wanted to stage a show on race that could use our collection to tell a story that had been absent from the conversation both within the museum and outside,” Mr. Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”

The goal, he said, is to demonstrate what happens to the concept of the “dandy,” as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it is racialized. When, for example, an enslaved person is treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed — and how those clothes in turn were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it will illustrate how contemporary Black men’s wear designers use their work to connect to this tradition.