In 2023, it was “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” In 2024, it was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.” And now, the Costume Institute has officially selected a theme for next year’s Met Gala.
And the 2025 Met Gala Theme Is...
Menswear is back
Published Oct 9, 2024
•5:41pm
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Today, Vogue announced that the theme for the 2025 Met Ball and Costume Institute Gala will be—drumroll, please—“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” It will focus exclusively on menswear, which hasn’t happened since “Men in Skirts” in 2003.
According to Vogue, the exhibit will explore a style subculture called the Black dandy. It will “illustrate how Black people transformed from being enslaved and stylized as luxury items, acquired like any other signifier of wealth and status, to autonomous self-fashioning individuals who are global trendsetters.”
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Although Andrew Bolton will remain Curator in Charge, this is the first time he’s selected a guest curator, Monica Miller. She’s a professor and chair of Africana Studies at Columbia University, and she “will examine the figure of the Black dandy.”
“I feel that the show itself marks a really important step in our commitment to diversifying our exhibitions and collections, as well as redressing some of the historical biases within our curatorial practice,” Bolton told Vogue. “It’s very much about making fashion at The Met more of a gateway to access and inclusivity.”
He continued, “What’s interesting about Black dandyism is it’s not just an identity. Obviously, you have people like Iké Udé, the photographer and artist who self-identifies as a dandy [Udé is serving as Special Consultant to the exhibition], but it’s also a concept as well [...] I think a lot of Black designers today are exploring the different modalities that the Black dandy represents—things like freedom, dissonance, theatricality.”
Let the countdown to May 5, 2025 begin.
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