Black Fashion and Dress Cultures

This class is a cultural history of Black fashion and dress through the lens of the current Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. Superfine presents a cultural and historical examination of Black dandyism, from Enlightenment England to contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art and fashion worlds of Paris, London, and New York.

Historical manifestations of dandyism range from absolute precision in dress and tailoring to flamboyance and fabulousness in self-presentation. The Superfine exhibition uses dandyism to chronicle the ways in which Black people have used dress and fashion to transform the identities they were given and to propose new ways of embodying political and social possibilities. Interpreting Black dandyism as both an aesthetics and a politics, this class emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to Black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.