The Black Dandy at the Met Gala

The theme for this year’s Met Gala was an homage to The Black Dandy.

Titled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City examined the African American tradition of being impeccably dressed and using fashion as a means to communicate autonomy, agency, political statements, and, above all else, humanity. Black Dandies define themselves according to their own terms.

Think of men like the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, the author James Baldwin, and the Vogue fashion editor André Leon Talley.

This year’s event, which featured a blue carpet entrance, was packed with celebrities and served as a showcase for the latest in high fashion. The gathering also centered Blackness with its nod to Dandyism, which scholars say is rooted in far more than the clothes themselves.

“The style challenges social hierarchies by subverting expectations of how Black men should present themselves. What was once used to mock Black people became their tool for resistance and self-expression,” said Monica L. Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity to Business of Fashion. Organizers of the Met Gala said that Miller’s book, which was published in 2009, was a key reference point for this year’s theme.

From its roots in the antebellum era when plantation owners would dress enslaved people in fine clothing, scholars say that Dandyism has evolved into the use of fashion to combat systems of oppression — racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, colonialism.

With its own set of inalienable rights, The Black Dandy exists at the intersections of autonomy and coercion, liberation and enslavement, resistance and compliance. To be Black and live in a world that profits from your subjugation is to be a trickster.

Only a Black Dandy could turn the Met Gala into a celebration of Blackness.

In this Q&A, Capital B speaks with Blakely Thornton, a pop culture anthropologist and commentator, who will host a Met Gala’s red carpet show for The Cut, who reflects on the significance of the aspect of Black fashion being on display for the world to see at this year’s Met Gala.

Capital B: Zach Stafford, the former editor-in-chief of The Advocate magazine and a columnist at MSNBC, described you as an example of the modern Black dandy. 

Blakely Thornton: Oh My God. I would say I am the spiritual child of André Leon Talley and Edward Enninful. Those are two people that are seminal figures in my life. I am living out their continued influence. I got to meet Edward last night. It was a full circle moment because I remember going to see The September Issue as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, in this theater in Montclair, New Jersey.

And being like, who is this Black gay man that’s working in fashion? You’re used to the idea of a fashion person who is skinny, cishet, white woman. Between Edward and André Leon Talley, those are like, and I would say honestly Lenny Kravitz, those are my three Black dandies, because there is a kind of a through line of style, luxury and truly being oneself in terms of taste.

There is an inherent relationship between Black Dandyism and luxury. I would love to hear about how you sit at the intersection of those two. 

It’s very interesting because I learned over the weekend that Met Galas are planned five years out. This gala was planned in 2020. We could not know that we would be basically in a fascist dictatorship that is looking to erase us. Black people and people in their cultural contributions in a political sense while having a corporately sponsored luxurious celebration of blackness.

It is a strange place to be, but I think on my base level, I try to choose joy as a form of protest and revolution. I think there is no other time when we’re going to have such a public and loud, luxurious celebration. I’m choosing to be a part of it for that.

I respect other people that don’t. I wanna see Blackness and queerness celebrated, and that is my choice to be, and that is my through line for being a part of it.

Since you are choosing joy, but also critique, how have you gone into designing your outfit for red carpet coverage? What story are you trying to tell? 

I texted Marc Jacobs or DM him because we follow each other and talk. One of my videos and one of my favorite pictures of André Leon Talley is a picture of them from the late ’80s, early ’90s. André’s in this like double-breasted, pinstripe gray suit.

I said, “Hey, I know this is really crazy. This is one of my favorite pictures of André. Do you have anyone in the city that you know of that could make something similar? That’s the style I’m going for.” I’m gonna show you what he did. He sent me a 2015 archival runway suit. It went down the runway on a Black woman.

I put it on and it fit me perfectly with zero tailoring. I’m now wearing a Marc Jacobs suit based on pictures of him and André Leon Talley from the ’80s, and some black fingerless gloves, and my own actual celebrity capitalism entry called slutty little glasses. I wanted to be on André Leon Talley meets Black banker meets Boomerang.

That is gorgeous. I’ve been talking so much about Talley’s spirit, his funeral service in New York, was three days prior to the Met Gala in 2022. So many of his spiritual children, including yourself, Zach Stafford, Lenny Kravitz, embody Black Dandyism. This year’s Met Gala feels like a homegoing service for him.

A hundred percent. I personally think that the gala should have been André Leon Talley themed. There have been so many Black dandies, literally from Monica Miller’s book, from Slaves to Fashion. I think the one who is, in my opinion, widest known and actually worked inside the system, to promote Blackness in the way that was most powerful, at any time is André Leon Talley.

The post Fashion as Resistance: The Black Dandy at the Met Gala appeared first on Capital B News.