TAILORED TO RESIST

The 2025 Met Gala's scholarly theme paired sharp silhouettes with sharper cultural thinking, anchoring fashion's biggest night with history, strategy, and meaning.

- ANANDHI GOPINATH

IT'S BEEN A GOOD FEW WEEKS since the 2025 Met Gala, and while the social media churn has moved on, this year's edition still deserves discussion—because, unusually, it gave us something to think about. On 5 May, under the theme 'Superfine: Tailoring Black Style', the Met's most public-facing event aligned, more tightly than usual, with the intellectual scaffolding of the exhibition it launched. The result was fashion at its most deliberate.

The Costume Institute's spring 2025 exhibition, which runs until 26 October, is an in-depth study of Black style over three centuries, viewed through the lens of dandyism. Drawing on the cultural currents of the 18th-century Atlantic world, it considers how Black individuals navigated and subverted imposed systems of dress, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The idea that self-presentation could be both aesthetic and political runs through the show's 12 thematic pillars, from Respectability and Beauty to Cosmopolitanism and Heritage. The garments, images and objects on display make it clear: Black style, particularly tailored dress, has always carried meaning beyond appearance.

The exhibition takes its cue from Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, a 2009 book by academic Monica L. Miller. It's a rigorous and absorbing study, and the Met's decision to base both its exhibition and Gala theme on it is significant. Fashion institutions don't always engage with critical theory in any meaningful way. This time, they did.