Everybody wake up! The Met Gala 2025 theme has been announced, giving attendees some seven months of warning before they’re expected to strut the world’s most exclusive red carpet.
While it may feel like the Met Gala 2024 has barely passed, we’re quickly moving onto the next one — fitting, considering this year’s theme was The Garden of Time (and the exhibition was Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion).
While this year’s floral-based theme was mocked for its general nature (”Florals, for spring?” etc) next year’s is decidedly more groundbreaking, as well as borderline historic.
The title of the 2025 exhibit is: Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. The chief inspiration for the exhibition is Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.
In her book, Miller chronicles the birth of the “Black Dandy”, a subculture of Black men who were known for their fine tailoring and sartorial elegance during the slave trade and following emancipation from slavery. Their outfits would later combine European “dandy” aesthetics with African expression.
Modern celebrities who have already drawn inspiration from the Black dandies include Andre 3000 and Pharrell Williams, who is one of next year’s co-chairs.
The other co-chairs of Met Gala will be Lewis Hamilton, Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky and Anna Wintour (who is co-chair every year), as well as Lebron James as an “honorary” co-chair.
According to Vogue, the Met Gala exhibition will examine “the importance of clothing and style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora.” It’s also the first menswear-centric exhibit since 2003’s “Men in Skirts.”
So, what can we expect? Hopefully: Black designers being worn almost exclusively. Women in menswear. Fine, fine tailoring, and blends of African and European styling. Hopefully not: Everyone just wearing black.
The exhibition will be arranged by “twelve characteristics of Black dandyism”, an organisational principle that takes inspiration from the 1934 Zora Neale Hurston essay, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression”.
The contemporary designers involved include Foday Dumbuya, Grace Wales Bonner, Pharrell Williams and the late, great Virgil Abloh.
