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In recent years, the theme of the Costume Institute’s big spring exhibition—and, in turn, the Met Gala—has often had an establishing textual reference, whether Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp or the works of Virginia Woolf. But 2025’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is particularly literary in its origins. Not only is the show, which considers the figure of the Black dandy, based on guest curator Monica Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (which began as her PhD dissertation in English literature at Harvard), but its structure is also inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” So, too, is it filled with the voices (and garments) of a thrilling range of Black writers, creatives, and changemakers. These include abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass; thinkers such as Maya Angelou and Ta-Nehisi Coates; and pop-cultural icons from Miles Davis and Muhammad Ali to André Leon Talley and Virgil Abloh.
For Miller, part of the joy of curating “Superfine” with the Costume Institute’s longtime head curator, Andrew Bolton, was weaving broadly familiar names into a surprising new context—namely, a cultural history of Black style. Take, for instance, the final of the exhibition’s 12 themed sections, Cosmopolitanism, for which the philosopher Frantz Fanon provides the epigraph: “In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
“Fanon had a lot to say about Blackness as a mask,” Miller tells Vogue. “He had a lot to say about surface and interiority, about the psychology of how people encounter Blackness, and the way Black people are projected into the social, cultural, and political world. He was doing that work—but I don’t think people expect to see him here. Whereas someone like Miles Davis, who we quote in another section, had a lot to say about being cool. Or Frederick Douglass, who had a lot to say about respectability, in really fascinating ways.”
Hurston, meanwhile, is a writer that Miller—a professor at Barnard College—teaches all the time (and not only because Hurston was Barnard’s first Black alumna). Her “eclectic” work as an anthropologist and folklorist complements an exhibition that, as Miller puts it, is “not interested in defining Black dandyism definitively” but rather in “offering different avenues, different entry points” for exploring the politics of Black dress.
In that spirit, ahead of the show’s May 10 opening, use the (abundant!) reading list below, supplied by Miller, as a sort of “Superfine” springboard—or, if you like, as a primer for the wonderfully teeming catalog. Have a browse, get suitably inspired, and we’ll see you at the museum very soon.
Books by and about figures referenced in the exhibition:
Books providing helpful background for the exhibition:
