Dapper Dan’s New House Logo, Debuting at the 2025 Met Gala, Carries Deep Meaning
It’s the Saturday night before the 2025 Met Gala, and Dapper Dan—the legendary Harlem-based designer, tastemaker, and modern-day dandy—is seated in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel, sipping a ginger ale. Outside, the gray-blue spring light is dipping quickly. Dressed in a silken olive green shirt with baroque fuchsia details, he scoots his chair closer and says, with the timbre of an almost divine wisdom: “Most people, when they get dressed, even if it’s subtle, make a statement. Black dandyism, though, isn’t that. It’s narrative.”
“Dap,” as his friends and colleagues call him (he was born Daniel R. Day), has been a Harlem icon for decades, revered for creating bespoke pieces—often made from Louis Vuitton and Gucci textiles—for many of the biggest hip-hop and R&B stars across the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. One original Dapper Dan piece appears in “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”: a 1987 baseball jacket made from monogrammed Louis Vuitton canvas, trimmed in mink, for Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC fame.
But this evening, we’re here to talk about his latest design: a black-and-white, all-over-sequined suit for the 2025 Met Gala.
The look stands out for many reasons, but mostly because it introduces what may become a signature Dapper Dan house logo: a heart-shaped crest laid over a set of “D” initials.
“When you see this here,” he says, “it’s because, all those years when I was underground and working with those European brands’ symbols, I came to understand just how powerful they were. And I’m finally doing something with my own symbol. This is that event.”
Still, there’s a deeper layer and meaning to his heart emblem.
“This symbol itself, it has a whole history,” Dap, who turned 80 last year, explains. “There were slaves who used to be assigned to iron works. And when they made the iron—the fences and the windows and whatnot—they added a symbol like this. It’s called Sankofa.” (The word comes from Ghana’s Akan society, and translates loosely to “go back and get it.”)
Dap shares that he first learned about the symbol decades ago while traveling through West Africa—a journey that brought him to Monrovia, Liberia, where a man offered to trade rare artifacts for clothing Dap had designed. (Those early exchanges, he says, gave him the confidence to start his business.)
He lifts the suit’s tailcoat, its tens of thousands of sequins glimmering, and turns it around to show another Sankofa mark: a large bird across the shoulders, its head craned to lift an egg resting behind its neck.
“What it means is going back to recall what has happened: To carry it. Not only us—Black, white, everybody. We cannot deal with where we’ve moved as a society until we go back and pick up and really understand everything that has led us here.” Its message is clear: To advance, we must reach into history to guide where we go next.
We settle again in the living room. Dap, who says he sees himself more as a cultural interpreter than a traditional designer, shares a story that perfectly underscores his view on forward motion, past experience, and the meaning between the two.
“When I was a boy, we used to swim in the Harlem River,” he says, using the term most locals do to describe the uptown tidal strait, which shifts direction with the tides. “But we needed to know which way the current was going so we wouldn’t have to swim against the water. We would take a popsicle stick and throw it in to see which way it was going, so we knew where to jump. And that thought stayed in my mind. I said, ‘That’s culture: You’ve got to know when to dive in, and how to follow the flow .”
1/5Dapper Dan holding up his 2025 Met Gala tailcoat.
2/5A detail shot of his new symbol.
