Black Dandyism, the 2025 Met Gala’s Theme, Has Its Roots in 18th-Century Painting

A young Black boy, wearing deep red livery with gold trimming, a gold earring, and red-and-white turban secured with a jeweled brooch, stares out at the viewer. Standing before a ship at sea, he hands a letter, addressed to “Monsieur le chevalier de Rohan, captain of the King’s ships at Rochefort,” to an older white man, dressed in regal-looking steel armor. Painted in 1758 by the workshop of Jean-Marc Nattier, this portrait commemorates Louis-Armand-Constantin de Rohan’s promotion to captain of the Raisonnable. This double portrait, featuring the naval officer and his enslaved servant, whose silver collar signifies his bondage, is an early example of a Black dandy, dressed by his owner in elegant garb. (A common motif in this type of 18th-century painting, the metal collar identified who an enslaved person belonged to in case of escape.) Researchers have identified the young sitter as Roch Aza, who was ten years old when he was taken from Martinique to France in 1753 and subsequently enslaved by the noble Rohan-Guéméné family.

At the height of the transatlantic slave trade, a new trend emerged in European painting in which depictions of well-dressed Black figures began appearing, alongside their enslaver, as a form of social currency. In addition to other signifiers of wealth and status, the added Black figure shows the white sitter as both a man of power and an aesthetic trendsetter. This pictorial motif quickly became de rigueur in the collections of European royalty, aristocracy, landed gentry, and even the wealthy merchant class who often benefited financially from slavery as traders or financiers.

“The fashionable presence [of Black sitters] enhanced the perceived cosmopolitanism of the [white] sitter, a visual shorthand for their access to empire, foreign goods, and control over other bodies,” Kofi Iddrisu, an archivist and founder of Ghana-based Archive Africa, told ARTnews. However, although Black sitters are included in these portraits, their faces are often obscured or shown from a side profile. Their rendering as secondary figures in this genre served as a painterly way to further dehumanize them.

The Roch Aza portrait is but one example of how this genre of well-dressed Black men emerged in art, and it is around a dozen paintings, alongside fashions, works on paper, historical and contemporary photography, sculpture, and decorative objects, included in “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Met Costume Institute’s much-anticipated spring exhibition that looks at over 300 years of Black dandyism. Opening to the public May 10 and the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala, the exhibition is a landmark, tracing the roots of contemporary Black male style to this era and showing how generations since have subverted what was once a signifier of enslavement. 

The transatlantic slave trade altered the wealthy’s consumption and spending habits: while goods extracted from European colonies, like coffee, sugar, chocolate, and tea, were regarded as luxury items, so too were enslaved Black people. Fashion, made from textiles and finery also sourced from the colonies, became one way for the European elite, at home and in the Americas, to vaunt their status. Dressing their enslaved servants to match became an extension of this practice, so much so that they became known as “luxury slaves.” This assertion of affluence and whiteness would soon become subsumed in the portraits they commissioned.

“Artists were working very consciously about having this relational representation of whiteness, blackness, the European and other,” Melissa Baksh, an independent art historian who has studied the history of colonialism in European painting, told ARTnews.

Similar to the Roch Aza portrait is another painting included in “Superfine,” in which the Black subject is even more finely dressed though presented by himself. Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Portrait d’un jeune homme noir (1710–20) shows a young Black man in green silk, a swath of velvet, a white turban, and metal collar. He is an individual, but still deemed by his master a form of property. Compare that to Charles Goring of Wiston and an Unknown Attendant (ca. 1765), previously attributed to Johan Joseph Zoffany, which is not included in the Met exhibition but currently on view in “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Like “Superfine,” this permanent collection show examines paintings from this period from a contemporary lens.

A double portrait of country domesticity, the Charles Goring painting shows a finely dressed Black servant in a navy-blue wool coat and red waistcoat who delivers a woodcock to his master after a successful shooting expedition. With his other hand, holding a tricorn hat, he pats the shoulder of the gentleman who looks at him with warmth. Yet, despite this relaxedness, there is still a clear racial hierarchy in which the young servant, whose name is still unknown, acts as a go-between between his master and the spaniel that fetched the bird.

That all three Black sitters are depicted wearing turbans, a nod to the influence of Orientalism, further shows them as an “exotic other,” a spoil of their European masters’ colonialist endeavors. This art historical tradition gave 18th-century white audiences “something novel to see—a form of entertainment like seeing a parrot at a zoo,” said Chiedza Mhondoro, an assistant curator of British art at Tate Britain. In their extravagant and exotic outfits, these Black figures, who had “very little agency, often dressed like toys,” according to Mhondoro, are both an image of mockery and splendor for the people who owned them.

In her 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, historian Monica L. Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, examines the cultural history of the Black dandy and its evolution from its origins in 18th-century Enlightenment England, when Black figures were forced into wearing dandified clothing; to how it was reinterpreted in the late 19th century by freed slaves, like Julius Soubise, who was famed for wearing eye-catching fashions such as his red-heeled, diamond-buckled shoes to high society events in London; to its contemporary transformations as a form of expression, identity, and a political and aesthetic construct in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Miller’s book serves as the inspiration for “Superfine,” which explores Black dandyism and all its complexities across 12 different themes, including “Ownership,” “Freedom,” “Respectability,” and “Cosmopolitanism.” The first Costume Institute exhibition to primarily feature the fashions of designers of color and the first in 20 years to focus entirely on menswear, “Superfine” takes its title from the 1789 memoir of freedman Olaudah Equiano, describing his journey from slavery, including being sold multiple times, to buying his freedom. “I laid out above eight pounds of my money for a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom,” he wrote nearly 250 years ago.

“Dandyism can seem frivolous, but it often poses a challenge to or a transcendence of social and cultural hierarchies,” Miller, who guest curated “Superfine” for the Met, writes in the exhibition catalog. “Thus, Black dandyism is a sartorial style that asks questions about identity, representation, and mobility in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and power. Superfine: Tailoring Black Style explores dandyism as, among many other things, a dialectic—a movement between being dandified and taking on dandyism as a means of self-fashioning.”

In selecting his superfine suit, which appears on the frontispiece to his memoir, Equiano was broadcasting “the importance and profundity of the joy of self-possession and agency,” Miller adds. In that portrait, by Daniel Orme, Equiano is smartly dressed in a coat and waistcoat, with a linen-knotted cravat. 

Abolitionist figures like Equiano, Fredrick Douglass, or composer Ignatius Sancho, the first Black person in Britain to vote in national elections and one of Thomas Gainsborough’s famous sitters, were keenly aware of how Black dandyism had been forced upon enslaved men, sublimating it for their own ends. “We see the performance of refinement turned inward,” Iddrisu, the Archive Africa founder, said. “Through literature, dress, and portraiture, these men used the visual codes of aristocracy not to support empire, but to reclaim agency, intellect, and humanity.”

These Black dandy representations are soon modified into military garb, particularly when representing revolutionary figures, like Toussaint L’Ouverture. At the Met, Alexandre François Louis de Girardin’s 1804–05 portrait of one of the Haitian Revolution’s leaders, painted shortly after his death, shows him in sumptuous dress: a navy military jacket with gold embellishments and the bicorn hat of an officer, decorated with a tricolor cockade and plume. Near the L’Ouverture portrait is a copy of the revolutionary’s navy coat, custom-made for André Leon Talley, the legendary Black fashion editor, by John Galliano for Dior’s fall-winter 2000–01 haute couture collection.   

But, depictions of the Black dandy could also veer into racist caricature. An 1838 painting, Untitled (African American Musicians) and attributed to George Washington Mark, for example, shows three Black musicians, who are awkwardly depicted. Believed to be commissioned for an abolitionist sympathizer, their rendering suggests that “its maker or owner believed Black men deserved emancipation, but not necessarily equality. As with later caricatures, the artist implies that while the men depicted aspire to sophistication, they somehow miss the mark,” according to a wall text.

Similarly, the most famous 18th-century Black British dandy, Julius Soubise, led an unusual life of privilege for a Black man of that period. Enslaved to Captain Stair Douglas of the Royal Navy and later a member of the Duchess of Queensberry’s household, he was taught to ride horses and fence, becoming a celebrity within the upper class, known for the lavish lifestyle he led. In “Superfine,” Soubise is represented by an engraving, which carries the subtitle “A Mungo Macaroni,” made in 1772, more than half a century earlier that the Washington Mark painting. “Mungo” refers to the name of an enslaved Black man in the comedy opera The Padlock, which debuted in 1768 at London’s Dury Lane Theatre, achieving success—or notoriety—for its blackface caricature of a self-important, wealthy black man. The term was often used to describe so-called luxury slaves, while “Macaroni,” used to describe overly dressed, aristocratic Englishmen who upon returning from their European grand tour adopted the styles of the French court, further adds to the insult. These mocking terms make clear that Soubise’s over-the-top personality was considered above his station in a rigid society with strict racial hierarchies.

Given how few paintings of this nature exist, however, one interpretation of these 18th-century portraits of Black individuals sees them as a record of their lives, which have historically been obscured, if not purposefully erased, from history. However, Baksh, the art historian, pushed against this notion, calling them a “record at its base level,” especially when some paintings of Black enslaved people don’t correlate to historical records of actual people. Take John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781, which is not included in “Superfine.” It depicts a Black man in uniform in a different color compared to the other soldiers; his identity is unknown and thought to be fictional, of Copley’s own imagination. As a form of political propaganda, the painting instead “spoke on the idea of overseas colonies being faithful to Britain,” in which a Black man is “avenging the death of a white British officer” at the hands of the French.

The depictions of the Black dandy in art across the past 300 years range from replicating systems of subjugation and preserving racial hierarchies for both the enslaved and the freed, to being transformed by Black people as symbols of their own humanity. After emancipation, Black people reclaimed space, becoming autonomous and self-fashioning individuals who, understanding the power of style, set trends on a global scale, both in the early 20th century and today. “The cultural and social significance of Black figures in 18th-century European art serves as a reminder of how deeply entangled visual culture was and remains with colonial ideology,” said Iddrisu.

With the advent of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, Harlem became the focal point for Black Intellectualism and artistic expression. Key figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Gladys Bentley broke racial barriers in a segregated country; their fashionable presentations became an armor against a world that saw them differently. A century later, similar ideas on the Black dandy continue with the stylish and tailored clothing seen on trend-setting figures like Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, and Pharrell Williams, all cochairs of this year’s Met Gala.

“Superfine” includes one 20th-century painting, Barkley L. Hendricks’s 1977 self-portrait, Slick, showing the artist in a double-breasted white suit and a patterned skullcap. He has styled himself on his own terms. A more recent example of this comes from Iké Udé, who is represented via his “Sartorial Anarchy” series (2010–13), of color-saturated self-portraits in which he dresses in dandified clothing that crosses cultures, time, and geography. These photos deconstruct and reimagine ideas of identity and gender, like in Sartorial Anarchy #5, showing Udé wearing a striped tweed blazer, blue-and-green striped trousers, knee-length green socks, and a large, exaggerated red wig that reference earlier fashion styles with a contemporary twist. (A special consultant for “Superfine,” Udé updated his “Sartorial Anarchy” series with his portraits of Domingo for Vogue’s May 2025 issue, dedicated to the Met exhibition.)

For the catalog, acclaimed photographer Tyler Mitchell likewise created a suite of 20 photographs that pays tribute to the different aesthetics of Black dandies of the 20th century, mixing and matching various eras in black and white and color images, in solo portraits and group shots.  

“Superfine” shows how artists and designers today carry forward the legacy of these 18th-century antecedents by presenting empowered new visions of style. They are “actively engaging with these earlier portraits by inserting regal, defiant Black figures into the heart of Western visual canon,” Iddrisu said. “In doing so, they don’t merely critique historical representation, they offer a new one, centered on dignity, power, and sovereign beauty.”