This year's Costume Institute spring exhibition and Met Gala are honouring black "dandy" style, and the tradition of bold tailoring worn by black men that has made a statement.

Black dandyism, the subject of the Costume Institute's much-anticipated spring 2025 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, is a rich theme. A dandy is a flamboyantly dressed male figure who is concerned not only with looking good but with making a statement about his identity and individuality. And black dandyism is a defiant declaration against confinement, a celebration of black identity, and a movement based around resistance, pride and history.

The story of black dandyism does not begin with clothing but with the absence of it. Enslaved Africans, writes Monica L Miller in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009), "arrived in America physically and metaphorically naked, a seeming tabula rasa on which European and new American fashions might be imposed". Dandyism was a critical response to this, and was born out of a desire to self-define and envisage new social and political possibilities – in a context where the very concept of "blackness" was created by non-black oppressors.

Inspired by Miller's seminal book, the exhibition examines how men's style, and in particular, dandyism, has helped shape transatlantic black identities for more than 300 years. The star-studded Met Gala in New York, which takes place on Monday, takes the corresponding theme "Tailored for you" as its dress code. Co-chairing and hosting the event are actor Colman Domingo, Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton, rapper A$AP Rocky and musician and creative director Pharrell Williams. They will work with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and honorary co-chair, basketball player LeBron James.

The show features garments, artworks, photographs and film, and explores 12 different characteristics of dandyism, ranging from Ownership, Heritage and Presence to Respectability, Beauty and Cool. The "superfine" in the title, says Miller, who is guest curator of the exhibition, pertains to "a finely woven wool, which we're using as an expression of luxury, but also feeling 'superfine'" – a reminder that how you dress can contain "a lot of emotion".

Indeed, one of slavery's first acts of debasement was to strip the enslaved of their own clothes, and dress them in standard-issue clothing. "Everyone was supposed to look exactly the same," Miller tells the BBC. "It was a vehicle of dehumanisation, but people immediately affixed buttons, ribbons, modified the garment a little, literally tailored it so that it could be individualised." Dandyism was already laying its foundations.

In the 17th and 18th Centuries, for enslaved Africans brought back to Europe as domestic servants, control was once again asserted by their masters – in some households they were dressed up in ostentatious, deliberately anachronistic livery, their masters objectifying them in order to signal the family's wealth. Some were educated alongside members of the host family, whose guests were amused to see someone of colour speak and act like a gentleman.

However, in the case of Julius Soubise – manumitted (released from slavery) in the 1760s by his British mistress, the Duchess of Queensbury – the joke was on the aristocrats. Soubise reclaimed and exaggerated the flamboyant clothing that his mistress had made him wear by adding diamond-buckled red-heeled shoes, lace frills and clouds of perfume, and his subversive, startlingly feminised dandyism created shockwaves among white society. Educated, witty and charming, and a capable equestrian, fencer and violinist, he destabilised established categorisations of race, gender and class, and forced a reimagining in the white consciousness of what a black man could be.

While Soubise used dandyism to assert visibility, elsewhere in the exhibition, dandyism is shown being used for concealment. It was a form of dressing up that enabled William and Ellen Craft to escape slavery in Georgia in 1848, as told in

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