Tonight’s the night Gotham City transforms into a fashion runway. The MET”s Costume Institute pays homage to 300 years of Black-style with SUPERFINE: Tailoring Black Style”.
Invited guests will arrive at 1000 Fifth Ave. dressed to express riffs on beauty, race, gender, class and sexuality from a Dandy’s point of view.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
12 galleries link the psychology of SUPERFINE to a multi-sensorial collection of garments, literature, music and art. The thesis explains the power of ‘dandyism’ a language of Black-consumption with a cultural taste for distinctive and evolving styles.
Photo Credit @MET Livery, American, ca.1840
Photo Credit: Ensemble, La QuanSmith,spring 2025
To catch the intersection of Pop-Culture and retro-African, European and American influences you can watch the $31 million dollar Red Carpet Gala live on Vogue.com, or the MET’s YouTube channel. Coverage begins at 6:00pm. If you plan to visit the galleries in person SUPERFINE opens to the public May 10th – October 26, 2025.
Photo Credit: Max Hollein, Lewis Hamilton, Monica Miller, Pharrell Williams, Andrew Bolton
SUPERFINE’s dandyism is a perfect compliment to “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie “.
Open until August 17th, 2025 this mega-installation also riffs on themes of style, race and sexuality but from a woman’s point of view. At first, the galleries of MONSTROUS BEAUTY appear to be unfocused and so garish it’s hard to know where to look next.
Shattered porcelains, once the trash of colonial China traders reimagined as objects of beauty
Kintsugi styled sculptures, a radical riff on feminist beauty.
The cultural catalyst for this provocative exhibit lies in the curatorial vision of Iris Moon.
Iris Moon with MET Art Director Max Hollein
Ms. Moon recasts the global story of familiar, seemingly innocent images into objet-d’art with a radically feminist point of view. The installation features familiar standards of femininity. Art in all forms allude to the sexual desirability of glowing alabaster, conforming curves and lux- laciness. However, in this exhibit the ideals are metaphors of repression.
At the March 27th preview Moon explained the transformative narrative as a “necessary unraveling of harmful myths from the past— myths about the exotic— that have hold over the present.”
Initially, galleries of MONSTROUS BEAUTY appear as a chaotic collection of charming tchotchkes, bookend by monumentally grotesque sculptures. The sentinels defy the collection of beauties until you understand their ugliness guards expressions of exploitation. Juxtaposition of definition is the point of the pointed exhibit.
Ms. Moon said when she watched the sequin and gauze covered sea-siren being uncrated for it’s MONSTROUS debut she shook and hasn’t stopped shaking since.
Sea-siren sculpture created for MONSTROUS
MONSTROUS BEAUTY begins with porcelain shards reclaimed as monumental sculptures recasting the meaning of beauty with a radically feminist point of view.
Reframing history boldly, this exhibit, like SUPERFINE leaves a lasting impression. They bust norms leaving room for personal expressions of beauty. Together they invite contemplation and dialogue.
The enormity of these exhibits tower over prejudice. And, if you let them, they have the power to shake your definition of beauty, shattering symbols of racial oppression and gender-bias then tailoring them with a new appreciation for the value of individuality.
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