Searching throughout time and around the world, “Superfine, Tailoring Black Style,” is the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s newest exhibition. Through arresting images and actual attire, it valorizes Black men as dandies. Juxtapositions can be dramatic. Depictions of enslaved Africans dressed exotically in silver and gold embellished liveries show objectified men whose very being was meant to advertise their “owners’” wealth and power. The artistry of this raiment is echoed by Black designers today with irony. There are lovely pieces on view by Ozwald Boateng, Jeffrey Banks, Christopher John Rogers, and others. But whether sequin spangled, embroidered with precious metals or not, the clothes Black dandies wear now are an ultimate expression of the value of self-possession.
“Superfine” posits dandyism, not as foppish or effeminate, but instead as the purview of one engaged in an act of defiance, insists Nigerian-American photographer and performer Ikè Udè. “A dandy is someone who refuses to be limited by expectations, stereotypes or anything designed to impose how Black men must present ourselves…” My filmmaker-curator friend, Kirk Shannon-Butts, just showed me a letter he sent to the Costume Institute in 2017. In it, he urges that they produce a show like “Black Style Now,” the one I did in 2006 for the Museum of the City of New York.
In “Superfine,” one observes what might seem to be a host of omissions and some interesting, even odd selections; for example, Muhammad Ali is represented by his satin trunks. But devoted dandies like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson are not on view. Where was Col. Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the ever elegant Black Eagle, Harlem designers Stefan Young and Willard Winter, or mega-dandy clergymen, like the Rev. Clarence H. Cobb or Prophet Jones?
Michael Henry Adams photos
These stylish giants of Black greatness were nowhere to be found. But, it does not matter.
A chief problem of America’s lack of either diversity, equity, or inclusion, is that given the opportunity to remedy the situation, one is tempted to try to squeeze whatever can be squished into a project like this. Self-assured and self-controlled, the editing inherent in “Superfine” is quite remarkable. The first-ever Met exhibit of its kind –– devoted to Black sartorial splendors and imagination –– “Superfine” is the very embodiment of DEI, not the least quality of its considerable appeal and success.
In 1988, as a smartly dressed André Leon Talley happily strolled past Bergdorf Goodman, he was photographed by Arthur Elgort. With an expression of supreme contentment, the towering, long-time creative director and editor-at-large of Vogue Magazine, also wore a medium gray, panel-checked, wool suit, tailored by Morty Sills. We’re told this by his dear friend and one-time employer, Anna Wintour. The by-now legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue recalls, “He understood that, especially as a Black man, what you wore told a story about you.” That being so, it’s no surprise that this photograph of Talley, his suit, and even an artfully arranged pile of the Louis Vuitton luggage he used, is among “Superfine”’s attractions.
“There are a number of ancestors,” in the exhibition, “including André Leon Talley,” relates Guest Curator, Columbia University’s and Barnard College’s Chair of Africana Studies, and acclaimed scholar Monica L. Miller. She wrote the book on which Superfine was based, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.” “Anna Wintour, calling to say they were thinking they’d like to turn my book into a Met exhibition, still seems like a dream come true.”
If Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s director, speaks of Andrè Leon Talley as a dandy on the order of Balzac and Baudelaire, Ms. Miller stresses how much the adroit fashion authority’s legacy influenced this project. Talley’s style “exemplifies some of the aspects of dandyism we highlight. He gave us — the world of fashion and Black people … so much. I hope the exhibition shows him just a little of the respect he is due.”
Ikè Udè is another person who influenced Miller’s vision. A dandy par excellence, the Nigerian-born, New York-based connoisseur-gallerist-photographer’s picture appears on her book’s cover. And he serves as “Superfine”’s Special Consultant.
Even as Miller and her colleagues have been hard at work assembling “Superfine” from myriad components and contributors, Ms. Wintour and her team were busy at Vogue. With the first Monday in May Met Gala in mind, with their May Issue, they devised what she calls, “a parallel effort: a tribute to the exhibition and a celebration of its themes of menswear, identity and history, the Black dandy in fashion, and his many expressions and forms.”
Because of his imposing stature, and following the escalating weight gain brought on by the death of his beloved grandmother, detractors (and the envious, said Hilton Als) often referred to Talley derisively as Queen Kong. Maintaining that he once fell in love with him, in 1994, The New Yorker’s insightful Hilton Als profiled Talley, pinpointing his elemental significance to the world of high fashion. He was, Als says, dedicated to an “image in his head of a woman looking at the page and imagining herself on it, unaware of all that André Leon Talley has contributed to her imagination…”
For his deft portrayal of Talley a generation ago, Daniela Morera, then a correspondent for Italian Vogue, told Als how his friend was privileged via proximity to power, because he was an assistant to and close friend of the Costume Institute’s founding curator, Diana Vreeland. “Black people were as segregated in the industry then as they are now. André enjoyed a lot of attention from whites because he was ambitious and amusing … He was successful because he wasn’t a threat.”
Today Talley’s fascination endures due to his exalted status, the position, says designer Michael McCollom, “that he cherished as much as he detested, of being the only one.” Als explains just what such tokenism meant, describing “the only one” as someone “usually male, always somewhat ‘colored,’ and almost always gay.” For all his erudition, many say, that was Talley’s place.
Ability, race, and non-challenging charisma, still make all the “only ones” useful to employ. In Talley’s case, his associates becoming his friends proved problematic. Just how much Als tells us, recounting a lunch party Talley hosted in his Paris flat. Once wined and dined by their considerate host, even in those pre-camera phone days, it was determined that a commemorative group photo was in order. One guest, Roxanne Lowitt, instructed LouLou de La Falaise to stand behind their host. “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a n—-r dandy.”
“He knew everything about them and far more than [they] knew about the history of fashion. André used formidable knowledge, the way a dandy uses clothes and adornment, as a weapon and armor,” says Michael McCollom, the designer who took over Issa, to the praise of Bill Cunningham’s assessment, “Hot, Hot, Hot!” “Simultaneously admired and feared, his getting fat was their excuse to shame him and to be rid of the inferred criticism, his presence brought, that he knew, and they did not. It’s being aware, being woke, that most offends white supremacists about Blacks. I’m so glad this exhibition doesn’t resort to the ‘monkeyshines’ of White entertainment some resort to, to get ahead.”
It does not. And Black and White, more who are young and who love fashion, are destined to see “Superfine” and visit the Met, than since they mounted their “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” show. (But that “Superfine” had the six separate galleries that that show enjoyed). In the U.S., more people than white men have been exceptional. Black history, Black fashion, like the history of women, Latinos or the transgendered, it’s all American History, including Black dandies.
Musing about the rapturous ecstasies Talley would have experienced curating “Superfine,” the Superfine Met Gala, her ensemble, the toilettes of her family and all their friends, the menu, the flowers, and entertainment, Ms. Wintour observed, “André never had an ounce of shame. I’ll be thinking of him on the night of the Met Gala, an evening made for him –– and one I can scarcely believe he will miss.”
Without André Leon Talley, and with this exhibition he would have liked to create, it has taken almost a decade and an army with “Superfine, Tailoring Black Style,” for us to learn just one small aspect of what he lived.
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