‘Superfine’ Brings Radiant Black Style to the Met

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Art & Design|‘Superfine’ Brings Radiant Black Style to the Met

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/arts/design/superfine-black-style-met-costume-institute.html

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It’s probably too much to show up at one of these Costume Institute shows looking for the object that ties the whole thing together. Just because they’re about clothes doesn’t mean they have to do what a smart outfit does. And yet damn if I didn’t find a single object in this year’s installment that accomplishes just that, an et voilà piece that not only brings off the show itself but explains the courage that clothes have lent a people, a people who often weren’t meant — in the lands that either enslaved them or bankrolled their enslavement — to possess either: power or clothes, at least not the good ones.

So here’s to “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the institute’s 2025 edition, nestled within the flowing space of the Cantor Exhibition Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, and dreamed up and curated by the scholar Monica L. Miller, with Andrew Bolton, who heads the Costume Institute. Are the galleries done in solemn gunmetal tones? They are. Is that title academically ambiguous? ’Fraid so. But it’s luminous and vital anyway. It understands the particular significance of most of its objects and where to situate them for maximal emotional bang.

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House of Balmain. Ensemble, 2023. The designer Olivier Rousteing’s interpretation of the Veste Hussard, a 19th-century French cavalry jacket that he paired irreverently with nylon track pants.

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Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear designer, Pharrell Williams, created a jacket and trousers of blue, green, and black wool check jacquard; shirt of black cotton-silk plain weave; tie of brown silk crepe-backed satin; beret of black felted wool.

Three hundred years of garments, accessories and sartorial ideas, paintings, videos, sketches and cartoons, get-ups from recent collections by super brands with Black stewardship (Louis Vuitton men’s wear, Balmain) and comparatively newish Black designers (L’Enchanteur, Bstroy, Wales Bonner, Denzil Patrick) have all been assembled and meticulously arranged into 12-part themes, a structure that borrows quite loosely from Zora Neale Hurston’s delightfully asserted taxonomy, from 1934, “Characteristics of Negro Expression.” The themes (“Distinction,” “Jook,” “Cool,” “Heritage,” for starters) are arranged into a chronology that weds a history of fashion to the evolution of the African diaspora. We’re talking hundreds of pieces — shoes, coats, scarves, jewelry, luggage, happy-plantation-painted buttons, whole outfits on strapping onyx mannequins, not to mention The Hair, complete with so many side and middle parts that Moses had to be the barber) — all in a space whose open floor can narrow into alleys that land you in startling proximity to the unexpected.

That’s how I found my banger. I had made my way into the “Ownership” section that began my route through the show (no one says you have to obey the path of the themes, but it does culminate in a story that rewards adherence). It includes a case holding a 300-year-old livery waistcoat in tender lavender silk alongside a cropped number in tan wool so stiff with age that, at this point, it looks as heavy as a travertine slab. A child had worn it. Each section situates the historical garments near a contemporary counterpart. In “Ownership,” one such connection involved encasing those waistcoats below a double-breasted Balmain suit with gold-covered effects.