Kendall Jenner Channeled a Queer Harlem Renaissance Icon at the 2025 Met Gala
Kendall Jenner may have delivered her biggest sartorial surprise to date at the 2025 Met Gala.
With 11 Met Gala appearances under her belt, as of last night, Jenner is no stranger to a showstopping moment: In 2019, she coordinated with sister Kylie in Versace showgirl outfits; last year, she became the first person to ever wear a piece from Alexander McQueen’s fall 1999 Givenchy haute couture collection. And for the 2025 Met Gala, Jenner took a delightfully unexpected route, tapping independent British designer Torishéju Dumi, whose eponymous label, Torishéju, has found fans among Zendaya, Naomi Campbell, and Paloma Elsesser.
“I had a vision of being very minimal and tailored for this Met, and I went on the hunt to find something interesting and fresh and super-exciting to me. Finding a new, young designer was the vision,” Jenner says of Dumi, who was introduced to her by her friend, stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. “She’s very technically trained, which gives her a lot of depth to expand on what tailoring can mean.”
While the Costume Institute’s exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” primarily considers Black dandyism in menswear, Jenner and Dumi were galvanized by a female dandy: the queer nightclub singer Gladys Bentley. Dumi stumbled across Bentley when researching Black women who engaged with tailoring, and she found her story particularly poignant. “She had a really strong sense of self,” she says. “Being a woman and taking tailoring—something that many people just perceive to be a menswear aesthetic—she turned it into her own and she dressed it up, took it apart, and made it something that really resonated with her own style, her music, everything.”
While Bentley was partial to suiting from a young age, she is most associated with the three-piece suit she wore when she took a job as a pianist at the gay speakeasy Harry Hansberry’s Clam House during the Harlem Renaissance. Though she was most often pictured in a white suit with a top hat and cane, Dumi was inspired by Bentley’s legacy and her extensive history with menswear in creating her look for Jenner—not necessarily seeking to re-create Bentley’s most iconic outfit. The designer wanted to highlight the model’s silhouette, fashioning an impeccably tailored skirt suit with a nipped-in waist, elongated torso, and exaggerated curves.
“The pieces that Gladys wore were tailored to her body, and it was a sense of style and a sense of personality that she also brought about within that look,” Dumi says. “I think there’s only so much clothes can do. I think when you’re designing clothes for people, you have to really think about who they are, how they want to be perceived, and then tailor it to them. And that’s what I really wanted to do with Kendall.”
Jenner sought to bring the emphasis on natural beauty to her makeup look. In the lead-up to the Met Gala, she had been on set for a L’Oréal shoot, where she was keen to practice her beauty look ahead of the big day. “Every day we have been doing mini Met trials before we do our major L’Oréal look,” Jenner says. “We wanted to lean really minimal, very fresh-faced and dewy—more just enhancing natural beauty.”
Ahead of their fitting in Paris, Jenner and Dumi whittled down six initial sketches to the three top contenders before eventually settling on the final look. The two united on a shared vision of highlighting the technique, letting the work speak for itself. “We came up with this elegant two-piece skirt—it’s very elongated and sculptural, and it enhances the female form,” Jenner says. “The drama isn’t really in the color—it’s more in the cut and the silhouette. I feel like that’s just encouraging close attention to the precision and the tailoring.” Dumi adds: “It accentuates her body and all her curves. That’s what it’s about: Being feminine yet still having that power to not be so revealing, but at the same time still being quite sensual and romantic and strong.”
When considering Black dandyism, the designer looked beyond the Harlem Renaissance, drawing on her Nigerian heritage as well. “The British Empire really, really had an effect on Nigerian style and what they wore and how they dress. They started to trade clothing for spices, etc., and they would pair that with their own traditional attire. It’s still present in the day-to-day attire in Nigeria,” Dumi says. She points to her grandfather’s Nigerian Lapa shirts, which are heavily influenced by British tailoring. “You can see in the detail—the way the shirt wraps around the body and hangs over the shoulders. That’s what I wanted to emulate in Kendall’s blazer. I’m all about taking something that people are very familiar with, but tweaking it ever so slightly.” The skirt’s form-fitting silhouette also calls back to wrap skirts favored by Nigerian women. “It’s so sophisticated and chic in that way where it just almost creates a little puddle on the floor that surrounds her,” Dumi adds.
Even the way the skirt suit was constructed speaks to an element of dandyism. The look was created with nearly 100 feet of deadstock fabric over 242 hours, underscoring Dumi’s ongoing commitment to sustainability. As the designer puts it: “It’s all about using what you have.”
Adrian Martin1/4
Adrian Martin2/4
