Barnard professor Monica L. Miller inspires The Met Costume Institute’s 2025 exhibit
Miller, professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, is the guest curator at The Met’s spring 2025 exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” The exhibition is based on her book about Black dandyism.
Photography by Sherry Chen/The Barnard Bulletin
November 18, 2024
Earlier in 2024, Dr. Monica L. Miller, Chair of Barnard’s Africana Studies Department, received a phone call from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge at the Institute, told Miller that The Met wanted to create an exhibition inspired by a book that Miller had written 15 years prior. She was in shock.
“I was unbelieving,” Miller says. “When you write an academic book, partly just trying to get tenure in your job, you are not thinking that it is going to go anywhere beyond your discipline.”
Miller’s 2009 “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” will inspire The Met’s spring 2025 costume exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” as well as The Met Gala next May. Miller, who is currently a guest curator at the Institute, is intimately involved with the curation of the exhibit, which will “explore the importance of sartorial style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora.”
“Exhibitions are like writing a book,” Miller says. “It’s a translation. How to translate my book into a visual 3-D experience. The narratives and the themes are there, but they are being presented in a very different way, in a way that I never anticipated.”
“Superfine” will trace the history of dandyism through a lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Dandyism is a style of elegant dress initially imposed on Black men in 18th century Europe and during the Atlantic slave trade. Black sartorial fashion later evolved as a form of self-fashioning, critically engaging with “the performativity, irony, and politics of consumption and consumerism that define such stylization,” as Miller wrote in “Slaves to Fashion.”
The Institute's exhibition next year, the first to focus exclusively on menswear since “Men in Skirts” in 2003, will display both historical and contemporary garments and accessories, as well as paintings, prints, and other forms of media.
In the exhibit’s first section, entitled “Ownership,” an unidentified enslaved man’s livery from 19th century Maryland, made up of purple velvet with gilded edges, will be featured. The Costume Institute is paying particular attention to how garments like these will be shown to visitors.
“We need to be very careful with those garments and how we display them, what we say about them, to help people understand that fashion can be violent, that people don’t always choose what they wear,” Miller says. “Especially when all of that is racialized, and related to enslavement.”
Curators of “Superfine” are engaging with aspects of Black dandyism that are contradictory, according to Miller. “We are thinking about situations in which Black people are being dandyfied, and situations where they choose to use clothing as a tool to say something on their own,” Miller says. “Each section will be making that movement, from being dressed to self-fashioning. It's a stark tension that’s there from the very beginning.”
“Over time, dandyism afforded… African Americans and Afro-Europeans an opportunity to employ not only clothing, but also gesture, irony, and wit to transform their given identities and posit new ways of embodying political and social possibilities in the Black Atlantic world,” an October 9 press release from the Costume Institute said.
The contemporary garments in “Superfine” will include the works of Black designers such as Pharrell Williams (a co-chair of the 2025 Met Gala), as well as the late Virgil Abloh of Men’s Louis Vuitton. All designers featured in the exhibit work with the history of dandyism and Black sartorial style in mind, according to Miller.
“Some people think fashion design is frivolous, and it can be,” Miller says. “But it’s also, for some designers, a deeply researched, serious activity, even if the clothing can sometimes be really ironic. In order for something to be ironic, you have to know what it’s riffing off of.”
And as for Miller’s favorite designer? Besides Abloh, it was British designer Grace Wales Bonner, whose brand was initially established exclusively for menswear. Wales Bonner proposes a “cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro Atlantic spirit,” according to the brand’s website.
“Her work is just exquisite,” Miller says. “She’s thinking about colonization, she’s thinking about imperialism, she’s thinking about Black culture and migration.”
Miller’s interest in Black sartorial style stems from her research about American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois as a Harvard University PhD student. After Miller enrolled in a class taught by Dr. Cornel West about Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk,” she came across a footnote which described Du Bois’ dislike of being caricatured as a Black dandy.
“At that point, I was like, ‘why would that be upsetting?’” Miller says. “Because, as far as I could tell, what I knew about dandyism was that it was a form of fancy-dress.” Miller later found that Du Bois’s closest reference to dandyism was associated with blackface minstrelsy, which played into stereotypical caricatures of Black men.
“Du Bois was not thinking about traditions of dandyism that were also operating during his time period,” Miller says, “which had to do with this incredible way that Black people in Harlem, including himself, were using clothing to say so much about how they thought about themselves at the beginning of the 20th century.”
But Miller’s exposure to dandyism began much earlier than Harvard. “Growing up in the 70s, I just saw a lot of people, in my own family and in our community, really ‘styling out.’ Just really taking clothing, dress, style — doing that in a way that was both joyful and politically purposeful.”
“It actually does matter when there is a Black person in the clothing, because they wear it differently, because it gets performed differently in Black communities,” says Miller. “It’s not only how those things look, but how people embody what they are doing with that clothing.”
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” will show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from May 10-October 26, 2025.