Today, we continue to see echoes of that original elegance in contemporary fashion. Cast your mind back to May, when Vogue unveiled the theme for the 2025 MET Gala, fashion’s biggest night of the year: “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” With its chair of stylish Black men — Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Lewis Hamilton — the event successfully introduced the fashion world to Black Dandyism. As Unbothered writer Taryn Finley explained at the time, a Dandy is, by its official definition, “a man unduly devoted to style, neatness, and fashion…” However, during the transatlantic slave trade, “enslavers dressed Black people in extravagant clothing and paraded them around, calling them ‘luxury slaves.’ It was used as a dehumanising form of minstrelsy that further objectified Black men.” Taryn explained that as time went on, Black people reclaimed Black dandyism. The Met Gala intended to illustrate this reclamation, and it largely achieved this.
