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.
