This year’s Costume Academy’s Spring Exhibition and Met Gala are respecting the black “playboy” style, as well as the tradition of black people wearing bold tailoring.

Black Dandyism is the theme of the Costume Academy’s highly anticipated Spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: tailoring black style, which is a rich theme. Playboy is a dressed male figure who not only cares about looking good, but also makes statements about his identity and personality. Black Playboy is a movement against lockdown, celebrating black identity and based on resistance, pride and history.

The story of Black Playboy starts not with clothes, but with no clothes. Slavery Africans, in slavery, Monica L Miller: Black Playboy and Black Emitting Sexual Identity Shape (2009), “Arriving in the United States, the body and metaphor, looks very similar The taste of the taste Possibly impose European and new American fashions. ”. Dudaoism is a key response to this and is out of a desire to self-define and envision new social and political possibilities, in the case of the concept of “black” created by non-black oppressors.

Inspired by Miller's groundbreaking book, the exhibition examines how men's styles, especially Playboy's styles have helped shape transatlantic black identities for more than 300 years. The star-studded Met Gala in New York, held Monday, takes the corresponding theme “tailored for you” as a dress code. Co-hosted and hosted the event by actor Colman Domingo, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, rapper A$AP Rocky and musician and creative director Pharrell Williams. They will work with Vogue editor Anna Wintour and basketball player Lebron James.

The show features costumes, artwork, photos and movies and explores 12 different traits of Playboy traits, from ownership, heritage and presence to respect, beauty and cool. Miller, the guest curator of the exhibition, said the title “super elf” is related to “a beautiful wool” that we use as an expression of luxury but also feel ‘super beautiful’ – a reminder of how your outfit contains “a lot of emotions.”

Indeed, one of the first derogatory acts of slavery was to strip away their own clothes and put on standard clothing. "Everyone should look exactly the same," Miller told the BBC. "It's a dehumanizing tool, but people immediately fixed the buttons, ribbons, made some modifications to the clothes, literally tailored so that it could be personalized." Playboy has laid the foundation.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, for the household servants brought back to Europe by enslaved Africans, their masters once again advocated control - in some families, they dressed up in bust, deliberately outdated outdated paintings, whose masters objectified their masters to indicate the wealth of the family. Some people are educated with host family members and their guests are happy to see people of color talking and like gentlemen.

But, in the case of Julius Soubise, his English mistress, Duchess of Queensbury, was in the 1760s (issued from slavery) (issued from slavery) - the joke was on the nobles. Soubise added diamonds, lace frills and clouds to the white society by adding diamond-wearing red-headed shoes, lace frills and perfume clouds and his subversive, shockingly feminine hidden dyiss to the white society, exaggerating the gorgeous outfits his mistress made him wear. An educated, witty and charming man, as well as a capable equestrian, fencing and violinist, who undermines established classifications of race, gender, and class and forces a reimagining of what a black man might be.

Although Soubise declares visibility with dandyism, elsewhere in the exhibition dandyism is proven to be used for hiding. As William's 1860 memoir says, it was a form of dressing that allowed William and Ellen Craft to escape Georgia's slavery in 1848. Violating the boundaries of race, gender and class, Ellen is an enslaved woman and her slave owner’s daughter, Ellen, disguised as a white ineffective gentleman – paired with bandages and suspenders on her chin, as well as green glasses – in order to escape the kidnapper, her husband William is sent to her servant. When William is excited with the free William with "a good second-hand white beaver (top hat), the couple's cover is almost blown up, drawing comments from a disgruntled seeder that his "master" is destroying him. Their escape was successful, and the two continued to build a new life in the oceans of England.

Later, with the abolition of slavery in 1865, crafts were boldly moved back to the United States, while other black Americans began to move from rural southern to expanding cities in the north, the first time that large black urban communities were established. One of them is Harlem, New York City, which became the center of creative expression during the 1920s and 1930s and embodies the black freedom that many dream of.

Dressing plays a central role in forging modern black identities and resisting lynching, riots and ongoing discrimination. In 1917, about 10,000 African-Americans participated in a silent protest march on Fifth Avenue in New York, men in black tailor-made suits, women and children in white. This shows the manifestation of respect, calmness and control, in contrast to the barbarity of violence committed against them.

Miller explained that the suit was a "history walk" in the exhibition, which included "from painted outfits... to tailgowns and different versions... and even tracking all versions that fit". One of the most typical examples is the Zoot suit, which debuted in Harlem’s dance hall in the 1930s and then spread across the country. Weared by performers like Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway, as well as activist Malcolm X, it features oversized shoulder pads, wide lapels and ankle cuffs, often paired with pocket watches and a hat wearing a hat on a long chain. Its sheer sexiness seems to be a thriving black community’s desire to occupy their own space and move freely.

When rationing was introduced in the 1940s, this expression of anti-culture became a source of indignation due to the amount of fabric required for small animals. This became an excuse for further violence against people of color, especially in Los Angeles, where white mobs deprived them of suits and cut fabrics with knives. However, the Zoot suit was too strong to give in to the elegance of black clothing to completely surrender, and continued to redefine its importance, reappearing as the trademark style of the music group Kid Creole and the coconut of the 1980s, for example, and later inspiring Rapper Mc Mc Hammer’s Icoric Baggy Baggy coggy croted croted the hammer perts hammer perts''hammer perts''hammer perts''.

Anna Wintour (Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, USA) was described in a recent article as "Dandy in the Dandies", André Leon Talley (1948-2022), the first black creative director of Vogue in the United States, was born at the end of the reign of Zoot Suit and became a member of the fashionable black lamps. His favorite 1980s photos appeared in the exhibition, as well as the Morty Sills suit he wore for the panels he was checking. Later, he became famous for his luxurious steeple cape. "He understands, especially as a black man, what you wear tells a story about you, about your history, about your self-esteem," Wintour wrote. "For Andre, dressing is an autobiography, an act of mischief and fantasy, and so on."

For Nigerian-American artist, photographer and writer Iké Udé, whose self-portrait appears on the cover of Miller's 2009 book, Building Through Fashion is a key response to the negative perception of it. In his 1995 article The Self Assumed, he wrote: “Although it can be consumed by public censorship, it can be preserved by private self-subjectivization.” In Tailor Anarchy #5 (2013), part of a series of self-portraits of Udé, we see the dandyism theiste, which contains both this display and satirizes it. "He wore men's clothing in all these portraits, but started from different periods and geographies," Miller explained. "It's a real manifestation of cosmopolitanism and wit."

Award-winning designer Foday Dumbuya’s clothing continues to be a theme of world-wide development, and his brand Labrum reflects his journey from Sierra Leone to Cyprus and England, with a slogan “Designed by Immigrants”. Much of his work celebrates his African heritage and uses keen tailoring designs to challenge negative links with Africa and immigration. “He is designing outfits for others who often use immigration documents from his family or incorporate him into printed silk fabrics,” Miller said. She added that the idea of ​​the exhibition began, and the observation of Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Metropolitan Clothing Collection, was that “men’s and black designers did have a Renaissance in it.”

Miller insists on the black dude being part of a culture that is constantly moving. “Blacks have been trying to go beyond stereotypes and grants, and if we can go back to the 19th century, they are trying to go beyond capture, so there is a way to fit into the culture.” So, Playboys show no signs of reduction. "It's very relevant to jazz riffing," Miller added. "Someone put it down, somebody picked it up, modified it, changed it, it turned into something new..."

Super Elf: Cropped Black Style From May 10 to October 26, 2025 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

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