Five names sit at the top of the 2025 Met Gala: Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky and Pharrell Williams as co-chairs, with LeBron James joining as honorary co-chair on his first appearance at the event.
The gala was set for Monday, 5 May 2025, the first Monday in May, as it has been since the event settled into its place on the fashion calendar in 1995. Its theme matched the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style”.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art described the show as a cultural and historical look at the Black dandy, from the figure’s emergence in 18th-century Enlightenment Europe to versions of it in cities around the world today. Archival garments, artworks and film excerpts were to examine “the importance of sartorial style to the formation of Black identities in the Atlantic diaspora”.
Where the idea came from
The exhibition draws on Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Miller, chair and professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, served as guest curator. Chief curator Andrew Bolton worked with her. It was the first show devoted to menswear in twenty years. The last, in 2003, was “Braveheart: Men in Skirts”.
The museum’s statement laid out the history. 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.” Black people, it went on, then used clothing, gesture, irony and wit to transform their given identities and imagine new ways of embodying political and social possibilities.
Visitors might expect to see echoes of Dapper Dan, the 1980s Harlem designer, as well as the late André Leon Talley in his padded red coats, Prince in ruffled blouses and purple suits, and Tyler, The Creator in leopard knitwear and fur hats.
Guests and dress code
The dress code, which follows the theme, was to be announced early in the new year. Last year guests dressed for “The Garden of Time”, while the exhibition was “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”.
The guest list is kept confidential. Page Six reported that Madonna, Diana Ross and her daughter Tracee Ellis Ross, Lauryn Hill, Lorde, Angela Bassett, Adam Scott, Doechii, Amelia Gray and Demi Moore were among those expected. Rihanna was expected alongside A$AP Rocky, though the gala has an 18-and-over rule, so their two sons would stay home. Tickets reportedly cost more than Dhs240,000 each.
Arrivals on the museum’s steps were to be broadcast live on major networks and the Vogue website. For viewers in the Gulf, that meant the early hours of Tuesday, 6 May.
