What If a Tuxedo Could Tell a Story? The Met Gala Is About to Show You

When the Met Gala unfurls next week, and the marble steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art are once again cast in the glow of flashbulbs and fashion’s shifting hierarchy, the fabric will move first. Tuxedos will glint. Capes will billow. Silk will catch in the breeze like a flag. And then—only then—will we see the men inside the clothes.

This year’s theme, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, does more than invite spectacle. It promises a conversation: between history and modernity, performance and resistance, subjugation and self-stylization. Somewhere between the gilt of a peacock plume brooch and the cut of a Nehru collar lies a theory of liberation. And when Colman Domingo—actor, icon, and this year’s co-chair—ascends those iconic steps, he won’t just be dressed to impress. He’ll be dressed to recall, suggest, and revise.

SEE MORE: What Does the 2025 Met Gala Theme Even Mean?

Dressing as declaration

The exhibition that anchors the gala is drawn from Slaves to Fashion, a 2009 book by scholar Monica L. Miller. But it isn’t merely a celebration of Black style—it is a curated tension. Between the enforced visibility of slavery and the aesthetic agency of the present. Between being seen and seeing oneself. It’s a study of the dandy, not as a foppish relic of European salons, but as a figure of Black resistance—a silhouette that dares to say: See me differently.

The phrase “superfine” is lifted from the writings of Olaudah Equiano, a freed West African who once spent eight pounds on a celebratory suit to mark his freedom. The gesture is elegant and disarming. And deeply political. For Olaudah, as for Harlem Renaissance legends and 21st-century icons like André 3000, clothing has never just been about taste. It’s been about refusal and reclaiming visibility on one’s own terms.

The politics of precision

Monica argues that dressing well has never been optional for Black people. It has been armor, strategy, and the minimum requirement for being taken seriously in a society that routinely offers white men the privilege of slovenliness. Where a tech billionaire can stumble onto a stage in a hoodie, Black men must often wear elegance like evidence.

In this context, Black dandyism isn’t frivolous. It’s frictional. The forthcoming exhibition traces that friction—through Josephine Baker’s manipulation of exotic spectacle, through enslaved people who fled with only their garments as camouflage. It sketches a history of people who have been caricatured, only to seize the caricature and make it couture.

This legacy is not solely masculine. Women have tailored their own forms of dandyism, slipping into suits and top hats, rewriting codes of both gender and race. Gladys Bentley, sharp in white satin at Harlem clubs; Grace Jones, slicing through binary fashion with every blazer she wore. Even today, echoes of that intentionality appear in the strategic silhouettes of Kamala Harris or Michelle Obama—public figures who use accessible style to build visual bridges, while spotlighting Black designers.

These are not costumes. They are statements. Aesthetic grammar for navigating visibility, authority, and identity. The tailoring sharpens the message: I know who I am, and I know you’re watching.

Owning it

What pulses beneath the glamour of Superfine is ownership—not just of fabric, but of history. The act of dressing up becomes an act of claiming space, rewriting narratives, and walking history forward. To be “owned” in the past, and to now “own it” in style, is a revolution in motion.

And while there’s always risk in staging ideas on the red carpet, Superfine insists that style and theory have always shared a seam. A lapel can speak. A brooch can testify. The clothes remember.

When the Met Gala guests step onto the carpet this year, they won’t just be interpreting a theme. They’ll be entering a tradition—a lineage of resistance stitched into silk and wool, of visibility as defiance, of fashion as future-making. The fabric will move first. And beneath it, history will walk again.

Photos courtesy Autograph ABP, The Met Museum, Biography