m.a.g.

What was a man wearing when the world insisted on not seeing him?

Inside the new MET exhibition

By Víctor Aparicio, Fashion Editor of Fantú Magazine. May 2025

Perhaps a three-piece suit in English wool, perfect shoulders, immaculate cuffs. Maybe what he’s wearing is an answer. Or revenge. This year, the MET dresses its annual exhibition with history, silhouette and power: 

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, because if last year’s edition was about sleeping beauties, this year the black dandies awaken, but this isn’t just an exhibition. It’s an ode to how black men from emancipated slaves to hip-hop icons have used tailoring as a way to say «I’m here» when all around them screamed otherwise.

The exhibition, curated by scholar Darnell-Jamal Lisby and based on Monica L. Miller’s book Slaves to Fashion, is structured into twelve rooms, each inspired by a key word in black cultural expression, drawn from Zora Neale Hurston’s legendary essay. «Ownership,» «Reinvention,» «Cosmopolitanism,» «Beauty.» Words that in white mouths sounded like privilege; in black mouths, hope.

And, as every first Monday of May, the gala arrived.

Dress code: Tailored for You. What sounds like a sartorial courtesy is actually a tease. How do you dress when no one else has made a suit for you? How do you define yourself in a system that wasn’t cut to fit you? This year, the answers were as personal as they were political: velvet capes, pheasant feathers and pinstripes.

Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Colman Domingo. LeBron James as honorary host. A generation that has understood that power is not inherited-it’s confected.

So no, this year you won’t see princesses sleeping under glass vitrines.

You’ll see vivacious bodies, fabrics with history, a look ahead and polished shoes.

And if you ever doubted the power of a good suit?

Go to the MET, look closely, and then try to look away.

Because fashion may not save the world,

but sometimes, just sometimes, it sits him in front of you and adjusts his blazer.