Fashion as Resistance: The Black Dandy at the Met Gala

This year's event focuses on the use of personal style as a cultural and political statement.

The theme for this year's Met Gala was an homage to The Black Dandy.

Titled "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style," the annual fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City examined the African American tradition of being impeccably dressed and using fashion as a means to communicate autonomy, agency, political statements, and, above all else, humanity. Black Dandies define themselves according to their own terms.

Think of men like the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, the author James Baldwin, and the Vogue fashion editor André Leon Talley.

This year's event, which featured a blue carpet entrance, was packed with celebrities and served as a showcase for the latest in high fashion. The gathering also centered Blackness with its nod to Dandyism, which scholars say is rooted in far more than the clothes themselves.

"The style challenges social hierarchies by subverting expectations of how Black men should present themselves. What was once used to mock Black people became their tool for resistance and self-expression," said Monica L. Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity to Business of Fashion. Organizers of the Met Gala said that Miller's book, which was published in 2009, was a key reference point for this year's theme.

From its roots in the antebellum era when plantation owners would dress enslaved people in fine clothing, scholars say that Dandyism has evolved into the use of fashion to combat systems of oppression -- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, colonialism.

With its own set of inalienable rights, The Black Dandy exists at the intersections of autonomy and coercion, liberation and enslavement, resistance and compliance. To be Black and live in a world that profits from your subjugation is to be a trickster.

Only a Black Dandy could turn the Met Gala into a celebration of Blackness.

Lord smite me now.

Here's the crotch-shot if you want to see it. You don't see her actual nyver, because she has a strap of fabric covering that, but she has sheer/transparent material over the sides of her pudenda. So you can see that.

Thanks to official Ace of Spades Fashion Correspondent Soothsayer.

I wonder if his wife helped him pick out his little outfit.

Below, Panem Fashion Police surround "celebrities" no one's heard of with moving walls so that no one sees them before they reveal themselves on the red carpet.

I needed a stupid and preferably super-gay story for the 4:30 slot and Soothsayer really delivered. Find Soothsayer's book, The Black Dandy: The Fashion of FIERCE!, wherever gay books are sold.