This year’s Met Gala theme was an homage to “The Black Dandy.”
The annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in New York City, titled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” examined the African American tradition of dressing impeccably and using fashion as a means to convey autonomy, agency, political statement, and above all, humanity. Black Dandies define themselves according to their own terms.
Think of men like sociologist Webb Du Bois, author James Baldwin, and Vogue fashion editor Andre Leon Talley.
Featuring a blue carpet entrance, this year’s event was packed with celebrities and showcased the latest in high fashion. The rally also centered blackness with a nod to dandyism. Dandyism, scholars say, has roots much deeper than the clothes themselves.
“This style challenges social hierarchies by subverting expectations of how black men should present themselves. What was once used to ridicule black men has become a tool of their resistance and self-expression,” said Monica L. Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity to Business of Fashion. Met Gala organizers said Miller’s book, published in 2009, was an important reference point for this year’s theme.
Dandyism has its origins in the antebellum era, when plantation owners dressed enslaved people in expensive clothing, and evolved into the use of fashion to combat systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism and colonialism, scholars say.
With unique and inalienable rights, Black Dandies exist at the intersection of autonomy and coercion, liberation and enslavement, resistance and compliance. To be black and live in a world where you profit from conquest is to be a trickster.
Only a black dandy can turn the Met Gala into a celebration of blackness.
In this Q&A, Capital B speaks with pop culture anthropologist and commentator Blakely Thornton, host of The Cut’s Met Gala red carpet show, to reflect on the importance of the aspects of black fashion on display to the world at this year’s Met Gala.
Capital B: Former Advocate editor-in-chief and MSNBC columnist Zach Stafford described you as an example of a modern-day black dandy.
Blakely Thornton: Oh my God. You could say I’m a spiritual child of Andre Leon Talley and Edward Enninful. These two people are influential people in my life. I live by their continuing influence. I got to meet Edward last night. It was a full-circle moment because I remember going to see The September Issue at this theater in Montclair, New Jersey, when I was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.
And who is this black gay man working in the fashion industry? You’re used to the idea of being a thin, slim, white female fashion person. Between Edward and Andre Leon Talley, they are similar. Honestly, Lenny Kravitz, those are my three black dandies. Because there’s kind of a consistent line in terms of style, luxury, and being truly yourself in terms of taste.
There is an essential relationship between black dandyism and luxury. I’d love to hear about how you sit at the intersection of those two.
I found out over the weekend that the Met Gala is being planned for five years from now, so it’s very interesting. This celebration was planned for 2020. Little did we know that we would be living in a fascist dictatorship that was basically trying to wipe us out. Black people and black people are making cultural contributions in a political sense while holding lavish corporate-sponsored black celebrations.
It’s strange to be here, but I think on a fundamental level I’m trying to choose joy as a form of protest and revolution. I don’t think there has ever been another occasion where such a noisy and lavish celebration was held in such a public place. That is why I am choosing to participate in it.
I respect those who don’t. I want to see blackness and queerness celebrated, and that’s my choice and my deciding factor to be a part of it.
You are choosing not only to delight but also to criticize. What kind of ideas did you put into designing the costumes for the red carpet coverage? What kind of story are you trying to tell?
I messaged Marc Jacobs and DMed him because we follow each other and talk to each other. One of my videos and one of my favorite photos of Andre Leon Talley is a photo of them from the late 80’s early 90’s. Andre is wearing a double-breasted pinstripe gray suit.
Andre Leon Talley attends the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & Catholic Imagination Costume Institute Gala held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 7, 2018 in New York City. (Kevin Mazur/MG18/Getty Images for the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Vogue)
“Hey, I know this is really crazy. This is one of my favorite photos of Andre. Do you know anyone in the city who would do something similar? That’s the style I’m going for.” Let me show you what he did. He sent me an archival runway suit from 2015. It went down the runway riding a black woman.
When I tried it on, it fit perfectly without any tailoring. I’m now wearing a Marc Jacobs suit based on an 80s photo of him and Andre Leon Talley, black fingerless gloves, and my own real-life entryway into celebrity capitalism: slutty little glasses. I wanted to be in Boomerang with Andre Leon Talley and the Black Banker.
That’s great. I’ve talked a lot about Talley’s spirit, and his funeral in New York took place three days before the 2022 Met Gala. Many of his spiritual children, including you, Zack Stafford, and Lenny Kravitz, embody black dandyism. This year’s Met Gala feels like a hometown service for him.
One hundred percent. Personally, I think the gala should have been themed around Andre Leon Talley. From slavery to fashion, there were plenty of black dandies, literally out of Monica Miller’s book. In my opinion, the person who is most widely known and who actually worked within the system and promoted blackness in the most powerful way of all time was Andre Leon Talley.
