The 2025 Met Gala will be the biggest yet for menswear
Overseen by Pharrell Williams, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky and Colman Domingo, the theme for the 2025 Met Gala is ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’
Words: Zak Maoui
The Met Gala, which in short is a charity ball serving the purpose of raising funds for the Met Museum's Costume Institution, is the biggest event on the fashion calendar. Year in year out (save for one covid-stricken year) the Met Gala has fallen on the first Monday in May, and brought out swathes of musicians, actors, designers, models and well, anyone who is anyone, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A full on fashionable affair, each of them must adhere to a strict theme overseen by Anna Wintour and Andrew Bolton, the museum's head curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Centre.
This year saw guests dress to the theme of "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion", while last year it was "Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty". For 2025, it has been announce that the theme will be "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style", with Pharrell Williams, A$AP Rocky, Lewis Hamilton and Colman Domingo acting as co-chairs alongside Anna Wintour, while Lebron James will be an honorary co-chair.
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is the first Met Gala theme in over 20 years to focus on menswear and it was inspired by guest curator Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.
The Met Gala website suggests that the theme and the co-aligned exhibition will offer “a cultural and historical examination of the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in Enlightenment Europe during the 18th century to today’s incarnations in cities around the world.”
"The exhibition will explore the importance of sartorial style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora," the site continues. "Historically, the term dandy was used to describe someone—often a man—who is extremely devoted to style and approaches it as a discipline. Dandyism was initially imposed on Black men in 18th-century Europe as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of consumerism created a trend of fashionably dressed, or dandified, servants. Dandyism offered Black people an opportunity to use clothing, gesture, irony, and wit to transform their given identities and imagine new ways of embodying political and social possibilities."
The 2025 Met Gala will likely serve as an all-out celebration of some of the best menswear in history. Whether it's the suits that sat front and centre of Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton collections, Wales Bonner's politically charged clothing or the Dandy suits designed by Britain's own Ozwald Boateng, expect to see it all in May next year.
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