Threads of Influence: A Series on Black Tailoring

A seven-part Guzangs series on Black tailoring, written into and around the 2025 Met Gala’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”

The Costume Institute’s 2025 theme made Black dandyism the subject of the year’s most-watched fashion event. Threads of Influence spent four weeks reporting around it, beginning with pre-colonial African menswear and ending on the Met steps. The series ran across seven volumes.

The series

Part I: Pre-Colonial African Menswear

The series opens before the suit. Drawing on the photographic archive of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Part I reads pre-colonial African menswear — including Zulu cowhide garments and beaded regalia — as a record of identity, rank, and community values.

Part II: Colonial Dandyism

Part II covers the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, when British, French, and Belgian colonial powers carried the European suit into Africa. The report follows how African men in Lagos, Accra, Leopoldville, and elsewhere reworked an instrument of imperial control into a vocabulary of selfhood, drawing on archival photography from the Gold Coast and the Achimota School.

Part III: The Sapeurs of Congo

Part III turns to la Sapologie and the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, the dress movement that runs through Brazzaville and Kinshasa. The piece reads the Sapeur’s composition — the cut of the suit, the cane, the angle of the hat — as ritual and as quiet refusal.

Part IV: The Elegance of Defiance

A history of Black tailoring as resistance and reinvention, from precolonial kings to the Sapeurs to the modern runway, opening with a Tokyo James Fall 2024 ready-to-wear look and reading the 2025 Met Gala theme as a continuation of that lineage.

Part V: The Co-Chairs

The Costume Institute named Colman Domingo, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams, and Lewis Hamilton as co-chairs, with LeBron James as honorary chair. Part V reads each man’s style record and imagines, in detail, how a designer like Imane Ayissi or Rich Mnisi might dress them for the night.

Part VI: The Host Committee

Part VI moves to the host committee. It works through figures including André 3000, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Grace Wales Bonner, sketching the looks each might wear and the African and diasporic design references those looks could carry.

Part VII: The Archive Walked

The closing essay reads the carpet itself, anchored on Lewis Hamilton’s ivory custom Grace Wales Bonner ensemble — a cropped tailcoat, high-waisted trousers with satin stripes, and a sash embroidered with cowrie shells — and on what it meant when the references the series had been tracing finally arrived at the Met.

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