The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Alfred Z. Solomon-Janet A. Sloane Endowment Fund

This striped navy twill ensemble is a prime example of the zoot suit, a style that gained popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s featuring sharp shoulders, a long jacket (no back vent), grand lapels and pant legs that ballooned to their cuffs.

The voluminous zoot suit was an innovation of Harlem dance halls, its generous cut seen as transgressive at a time when fabric was being rationed in the run-up to World War II, Professor Miller said.

The suits were embraced by Malcolm X, jazz musicians and young Black and Latino people in cities; in 1943, the Zoot Suit riots broke out when U.S. service members attacked Mexican American and Black “zoot suiters” in Los Angeles.

“This is a garment that on one hand brought people together, and was really about celebrating identity, celebrating music in relation to identity,” Professor Miller said. It was only because of particular social and political context, she added, that it “became a symbol of defiance, and then resistance.”

Maryland Center for History and Culture

This plum-colored velvet jacket and its matching waistcoat were worn by an enslaved man in Maryland in the 1840s, but they were modeled on European fashion from about a century earlier, Professor Miller said.

Dandified servants in wealthy households, then called “luxury slaves,” were dressed in exquisite but antiquated-looking ensembles that highlighted the wealth of their enslavers. “Some of them are magnificent at the same time that they’re really violent,” she said.

The coat, trimmed with ornamental strips of fabric called galloon, is more extravagant than the basic garments that tend to be associated with enslaved people.

“Many people think, and were taught, that enslavement looked one way — and it could look a number of ways,” she said, adding, “This garment not only marks the enslaved person wearing it as property, but also as conspicuous consumption.”

Collection Louis Vuitton and Quin Lewis Collection

The fashion editor André Leon Talley had about 50 pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage that symbolized his success and arrival in an industry where he was often the first and only Black man, Professor Miller said.

His monogrammed, hard-sided suitcases functioned as a glamorous shield for his personal effects: “What kind of protective armor did he need or take on in those situations?” she said. “These accessories are really poignant in that way.”

The curatorial team had long conversations about how best to represent Mr. Talley, who died in 2022, in the exhibition, which also includes a favorite Morty Sills suit and a billowing caftan.

The luggage helped mark his journey from the Jim Crow South to the heights of the fashion world, and reflected the strategically composed style he exhibited throughout each phase of his ascendance.

GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco

“Dandyism is a kind of performative act, but it also seems to have a soundtrack,” Professor Miller said as she approached a shimmering jacket embroidered with clear plastic sequins that was worn by the boundary-pushing disco superstar Sylvester.

The black-and-white jacket, with its woozy vertical stripes, was designed by Pat Campano, who also made exuberant stage wear for the Supremes.

Its broad shoulders nod to the zoot suit and its color palette matches that of the tuxedo, Professor Miller said. But the jacket came out of a period in the 1970s and 1980s when men’s wear, especially onstage, had begun to incorporate more conventionally feminine flourishes like sequins.

Following the civil rights, Black Power and sexual liberation movements, she said, “this moment of self-expression, particularly for Black L.G.B.T.Q. people, becomes more and more possible.”

Sid Sankaran; Pete Nice/the Hip Hop Museum, Bronx, N.Y.

This leather jacket with a mink collar, made for Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC, is one of the Harlem men’s wear legend Dapper Dan’s signature “knockups” — the designer’s term for his remixing of luxury logos into one-of-a-kind pieces.

By seizing traditional signifiers of wealth and status, like the Louis Vuitton monogram pattern, Dapper Dan was “actually wrestling it down into something that’s useful, and playful, for Black people,” Professor Miller said.

In 1992, Dapper Dan was forced to close his 125th Street boutique, where he outfitted the era’s biggest hip-hop stars, after Fendi successfully sued him for what it argued was trademark infringement.

He went on to collaborate with luxury fashion labels and open an atelier with Gucci in Harlem — perhaps a tacit admission from the fashion industry that it had absorbed plenty of unattributed ideas of its own from Black street style.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Rubel Collection

The abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass wore his own clothing when he sat for photographs, which was a lot: As the most photographed American of the 19th century, he understood that he “had to look a certain way in order to be heard,” Professor Miller said.

In this daguerreotype, taken by an unknown photographer around 1855, he is pictured staring directly into the camera, wearing a black double-breasted jacket with a stiff upright-collared shirt.

He argued in lectures including “Pictures and Progress” that photography was a potent tool to counter racist imagery of Black people.

“Out of necessity and strategy, but also out of interest, he had a really nuanced understanding of the power of images,” Professor Miller said.

Jeffrey Banks

This double-breasted wool suit of rich browns and grays was designed by Jeffrey Banks, who founded his namesake label in 1977 after working for Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

He often describes his work as classic with a twist, Professor Miller said, noting the suit’s soft silhouette and checkered pattern, layered under a bolder plaid overcoat.

The Jeffrey Banks ensemble appears in a section of the exhibition that examines the suit as a symbol both of pride and of protection in environments that could be hostile to Black men.

In conversations with Professor Miller and the Costume Institute curatorial team in preparation for the exhibition, many of them described suiting, she recalled, as “a way in which they could achieve something that W.E.B. Du Bois says in a novel earlier on: of being treated as you were dressed.”