by Ashley Parry

Monday 5^th May saw the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest Costume Institute exhibition – Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – and with it, another Met Gala! Like the Met, we at the Art Library have decided to celebrate Black fashion with a display of items from across the Bodleian’s collections.

As a topic, this is extremely fertile ground for exploration, combining history of fashion, decorative arts, fine art, social history, philosophy, and literature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity by Monica L. Miller. This book – which serves as the main inspiration for the Met’s exhibition – is a rich, nuanced and fascinating examination of key moments in the development of the Black dandy as a popular cultural figure and explores the tensions that this figure evokes. As Miller states, ‘the dandy is a figure who exists in the space between masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual, seeming and being, even when not specifically racialized’.¹

One person who consciously plays with these boundaries and who is intimately tied up with the Met’s exhibition is Nigerian artist, Iké Udé. Not only is his work featured in the exhibition and not only did he contribute an epilogue to the exhibition catalogue, but one of his photographic self-portraits graces the cover of Miller’s book. This photo provides an excellent example of how Udé practices the ‘discipline’ of dandyism – as he calls it² – in both his art and his appearance. He is further represented in the display through the sartorial photography catalogue Beyond Decorum: The Photography of Iké Udé. In this collection, Udé explores the boundaries between his subjects’ outward seeming and inner worlds as deep, dark secrets are stitched to the insides of their clothes.

Furthermore, as a Nigerian artist who largely resides and practices in the US, Udé is in some ways representative of another ‘thread’ of Miller’s exploration – namely, the complex relationship between blackness and Africa as cultural constructs. She discusses how racialised colonialism can lead to a perceived collapsing of many African diasporic experiences, but how, at the same time, Black people in the diaspora have been able to use these constructs in order to build their own styles and identities. This could be seen at the Met Gala through the inclusion of subtle cowrie detailing on Lewis Hamilton’s outfit, and in the books of the display through Mickaël Kra: Jewellery Between Paris Glamour and African Tradition, for which Kra takes inspiration from the jewellery-making practices of various hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa.

Then, in African Dress: Fashion, Agency and Performance, the opposite side of this exchange is presented through essays detailing the style experiences of a variety of communities throughout the African continent, and in the issue of African Arts on the display, including an article about the Sapeuses – the feminine equivalent of the more famous, besuited Sapeur Congolese subculture. Also, I have included here a photo by Kinshasa-based photographer Justin Makangara of a man whose striking combination of Congolese adornment with western-style garments and accessories illustrates the ways that some African communities are forging their own style paths.

Yinka Shonibare – represented here through catalogues for his Fabric-ation and Double Dutch exhibitions – similarly uses his sculptural dioramas, sumptuously dressed in African wax prints and often recreating the silhouettes and poses of famous white historical figures and events, to push past the boundaries and stereotypes created by colonialist narratives. Shonibare’s use of wax prints is a symbolically loaded one, not only because of the contrast between the stereotypically African patterns and the Europeanness of the clothing, but because that fabric contains within it a complex but often overlooked story of colonial appropriation and adoption. Wax prints originated in Indonesia, were then mass-produced first by the Dutch and then even more prolifically by the British, and finally sold to West African buyers.

Through these works he makes statements about identity construction, cultural appropriation and consumerism in ways that play out interestingly with Miller’s work on Black dandyism. For example, her exploration of the fraught nature of using extravagance for defiance is echoed by Shonibare when discussing his work: ‘In order to have aristocratic freedom to indulge, others need to be colonised. Fine art is excess par excellence. It is not going to emancipate you in any direct way.³ He also addresses the interplay of dandyism, race and class directly in Double Dutch through the photograph series ‘Diary of Victorian Dandy’.

In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life by Tavia Nyong’o– available as an ebook via SOLO and via the QR code in the display – the author discusses the same problem of high art, but with a fashionable twist. In the chapter ‘Critical Shade: The Angular Logics of Black Appearance’, Nyong’o dissects Trajal Harrell’s solo dance piece Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, Size Small. Harrell, in this piece, incorporates and dissects elements of both high fashion catwalks and the New York ballroom culture inspired by the same. Nyong’o in turn highlights the tensions of Harrell ‘performing in the avant-garde milieu that was once the stuff of vogueing fantasy⁴’ and explores possible interpretations of this tension.

In The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, Lindsey Stewart similarly examines the trials and limits of liberation – for example, how both Black joy and Black tragedy can be weaponised by white institutions to simplify African-American narratives into either abject tragedies or enchanting fables. Stewart uses the works of Zora Neale Hurston, blended with the art of famous contemporary figures such as Beyoncé and stories from her own experience as jumping-off points, and I thought this a fitting addition to this display as the 1934 Zora Neale Hurston essay, “The Characteristics of Negro Expression” was one of the inspirations for the Met’s exhibition. As Stewart details, one of Hurston’s key preoccupations was, in ways sometimes controversial, challenging the ‘tradition of tragic southern Black representation’⁵

Kehinde Wiley likewise challenges pervading narratives applied to African Americans – especially their exclusion from the canon of western art. In his portraits, he poses his black subjects in imitation of a variety of famous ‘Old Master’ paintings and stained-glass windows, constructing new meanings from their symbolic resonances. However, I thought Wiley’s art particularly works in a display on Black style and especially dandyism because of his keen interest in Black masculine identity – and especially how young Black men construct themselves. This can be seen in the participatory nature of some of his paintings and glassworks, in which he invited his models to choose their own outfits and which paintings they would like to copy. In this way, while the streetwear of these men might seem completely divorced from the flamboyance of a dandy, the two can be brought into conversation in Wiley’s art through a mediated process of self-fashioning and evidence of assertive masculine vanity. Furthermore, Wiley’s paintings also evoke connection with dandyism through his use of floral designs for his backgrounds, inspired by the prints of William Morris, a key contributor to the English Aesthetic movement.

Unfortunately, there isn’t space to write in-depth about every book in a single blog post, and I wish I could do so to recommend these fantastic books even further, but here I will quickly emphasise just a few. The exhibition catalogue for the V+A’s Fashioning Masculinities exhibition, while its focus is menswear more generally, pays tribute to the indispensability of Black male style, and features black men literally front and centre with a portrait of Omar Victor Diop on the front cover and other famous figures such as Marcus Rashford and Prince inside. Then, in The Birth of Cool, Carol Tulloch, like Monica Miller uses a key central idea – in this case, the concept of “cool” –to organise a tracing of Black style narratives through time, and, like Lindsey Stewart, she also draws upon personal experience in examining these narratives.

Finally, no display on Black style would be complete without the iconic zoot suit, represented here not only through Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, but also through The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory which focuses specifically on the style’s proliferation into the Pachuco subculture and specifically among Pachuca women.

I hope you have enjoyed this exploration of Black fashion inspired by these books and by the Met Gala as much as I enjoyed researching them. These are just a selection of the books available on Black history, art, and style in the Bodleian Libraries and I hope you will use it as a launch pad for further research on the subject.

Bibliography

A. Braun, M. Kra, and F. Vormese, Mickaël Kra: Jewellery Between Paris Glamour and African Tradition (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2006).

S. Coulson, Lilley, C., and Y. Shonibare, Yinka Shonibare MBE: Fabric-ation Exhibition Guide (Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2013).

N. Gainer, Vintage Black Glamour: Gentlemen’s Quarters (London: Rocket 88, 2016).

T. Garrard, African Gold: Jewellery and Ornaments From Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali and Senegal in the Collection of the Gold of Africa Barbier-Mueller Museum in Cape Town (Munich: Prestel, 2011).

R. Garelick, ‘America’s Premier Dandy Doesn’t Want the Title’, The New York Times, New York, The New York Times Company, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/style/met-gala-ike-ude-black-dandyism.html (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

T. Golden, Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994)

K. Hansen and M. Soyini (eds.), African Dress: Fashion, Agency and Performance (Oxford: Berg, 2013)

J. King, ‘The Art of Masculinity’, Colorlines, Oakland, CA; New York City, Race Forward, 2015, https://colorlines.com/article/art-masculinity/ (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

K. Laciste, ‘Practical Work: Sapeuses (Women Sapeurs) in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo’, African Arts, vol. 56, no. 4, 2023, pp.62-79.

G. Lamia (ed.), Kehinde Wiley: Peintre de L’Épopée (Gand: Snoeck, 2020).

J. Makangara, ‘Justin Makangara’, Congo in Conversation, Hyères, Fondation Carmignac  2021 https://congoinconversation.fondationcarmignac.com/en/journalists/justin-makangara (Accessed: 08 May 2025).

J. Marsh, Black Victorians: Black People in British Art, 1800-1900 (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2005).

M. McCollom, The Way We Wore: Black Style Then (New York: Glitterati Incorporated, 2006).

M. McCurdy, Kehinde Wiley: A Portrait of a Young Gentleman (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, 2022).

R. McKever and C. Wilcox (eds.), Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear (London: V&A Publishing, 2022).

K. Mercer, ‘Art That is Ethnic in Inverted Commas’, Frieze, London, Frieze Publishing Ltd., 1995, https://www.frieze.com/article/art-ethnic-inverted-commas (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

T. Muriu, Camo (Los Angeles, California: Chronicle Chroma, 2024).

T. Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2019)

K. Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

R. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

C. Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory, Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2009).

L. Roach, How to Build a Fashion Icon: Notes on Confidence From the World’s Only Image Architect (New York: Abrams Image, 2024).

D. Rodgers, ‘Everything You Need To Know About The Met Gala 2025’, Vogue, Condé Nast, New York, 2025 https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/met-gala (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Y. Shonibare and others, Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Rotterdam : Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen ; [Vienna] : Kunsthalle Wien ; Rotterdam : NAi Publishers ; New York : D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2004).

L. Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, (Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021).

E. Tsai, C. Choi, and K. Wiley, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic (Munich: DelMonico, 2015).

C. Tulloch, Black Style (London: V&A Publications, 2004).

C. Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora, Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

Victoria and Albert Museum, An introduction to the Aesthetic Movement, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/an-introduction-to-the-aesthetic-movement?srsltid=AfmBOop4qQvK1h4Jr7J5AGtwvgeHxKr_XFZjWxmsxcVbtyl-5WvKEGdF (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

S. White and G. White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture From its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 1998).

K. Wiley, Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis, (Culver City, California: Roberts Projects, 2019).

1. Miller, Monica L., Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham ; London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 6.
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2. R. Garelick, ‘America’s Premier Dandy Doesn’t Want the Title’, The New York Times, New York, The New York Times Company, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/28/style/met-gala-ike-ude-black-dandyism.html (Accessed: 07 May 2025). ↩︎
3. K. Mercer, Art That is Ethnic in Inverted Commas, Frieze, London, Frieze Publishing Ltd., 1995, https://www.frieze.com/article/art-ethnic-inverted-commas (Accessed: 07 May 2025). ↩︎
4. T. Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p.30 ↩︎
5. L. Stewart, The Politics of Black Joy: Zora Neale Hurston and Neo-Abolitionism, (Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2021), p.47 ↩︎