Janicza Bravo Embodied the 2025 Met Gala Theme in Custom Tory Burch—With Help From Rashid Johnson

“This is the room where we bear witness.” It’s five days before the 2025 Met Gala, and Rashid Johnson is standing in a wide room surrounded by some of his paintings. The artist, whose work is currently on display a stone’s throw away from The Met at the Guggenheim Museum, is walking designer Tory Burch and director Janicza Bravo through his studio in Bushwick. Near the entrance to this very room stands a whiteboard covered in fabrics, sketches, fitting images, and a mood board. The three luminaires have collaborated on an ensemble for Bravo to wear on the first Monday in May. “It’s been a joy to bear witness to the work Tory and her team and Janicza have put into this exchange,” says Johnson. “I really liked the opportunity to not necessarily be the generator as much as the audience, and this was a really beautiful chance to do that.” It’s no wonder he’s assembled the group in this very room. Johnson is a longtime friend of Burch’s; he and his wife, artist Sheree Hovsepian, have attended the Met Gala as the designer’s guests in the past, yet this marks their first official collaboration. Burch says it was a no-brainer once the theme of this year’s Met Gala was announced. (“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the new exhibition at the Costume Institute, examines the nuanced history of dandyism in the context of Black sartorial history.) The dress code for the gala, Tailored for You, encouraged attendees to play with tailoring and menswear by imbuing their own style idiosyncrasies. And while Johnson may insist on his role as witness, it’s his work that buoys the look: Burch and her team have reconceived some of his paintings—edited to a selection of three with Bravo’s input—as couture-grade fabrics. The shrunken cotton jacket Bravo arrived in at The Met carries the faces Johnson originally illustrated with black soap in Untitled, Anxious Audience (2019)—rendered now in micro sequins and caviar beading. Underneath is a double skirt with the lively brush strokes of Johnson’s Body and Soul (2021), interpreted as jagged embroideries, flocked velvet, overlapping sequins, and painted foil. Yet Bravo was particularly drawn to Heartbreaker (2022) from Johnson’s Seascape series, with the artist’s singular, highly tactile technique here translated onto fabric with silicone embossing over transparent paillettes. In addition, Bravo wore a collar in hand-cut organza with a silk charmeuse ascot and a mini tote embellished with the same motif as her jacket. Burch was introduced to Bravo through the playwright and modern dandy Jeremy O. Harris, who is, in the words of the director, “a social doula.” “When Rashid and I spoke, the one thing he was focused on was someone of ‘extreme substance,’” says Burch. “As soon as Jeremy mentioned Janicza, we knew.” Johnson adds: “I don’t want to be involved [with someone] I don’t have a tremendous amount of respect for, so I kind of jokingly said, ‘Well, let’s dress Toni Morrison.’ That led to Jeremy saying, more or less, ‘Well, I think I know who today’s Toni Morrison is.’” Morrison was Johnson’s ideal because, he says, she represented “this sense of sovereignty and autonomy and willingness to challenge any sort of expectation,” he says. “When she was challenged with a question, she pushed back to make sure you understood that her perspective is not going to be manipulated by the exterior source.” It’s a quality crucial to the world today, where intentions and perspectives are so easily misinterpreted or devoid of nuance. For the silhouettes, Burch and Bravo found inspiration in another legendary Black savant. “We were having the same conversation but independently and then arrived at the same place,” says Bravo. She and the designer both pulled an image of Belle da Costa Greene, an American librarian known for building, managing, and developing the personal library of J.P. Morgan. (Only recently was she the subject of an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.) “Greene used fashion to claim, express, and protect her identity,” offers Burch, “an early example of dandyism through a feminine lens.” Da Costa Greene led a life rooted in self-invention and self-fashioning. Having come up in the context of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she spent her professional career passing as a white woman. She was born Belle Marion Greener, changing her surname to Greene alongside her siblings and mother after the latter divorced their father. (She then added Da Costa to her name to contextualize her olive complexion as someone of Portuguese heritage.) “I found the picture on our mood board and got to know her story more after I saw the picture,” says Burch. “In many ways it was quite heartbreaking, but it was the exuberance and the idea of self-expression that I really responded to.” She added: “It was daunting to work with Janicza and Rashid because it felt hard to express my respect for them in a physical object, but the enormity of what it means to be able to do a project like this at this moment in history is huge.” “As a filmmaker, I feel as if I’m playing a character,” says Bravo of the Met Gala and finding inspiration in characters like Greene. “I get to be some larger-than-life version of myself.” Bravo says she often prefers to ask questions rather than answer them, to interrogate them as audience rather than subject. Tonight, she found the opportunity to do both with “a look that is so deeply a collaboration between two artists I respect—an opportunity to step forward, as opposed to back.”