The Brooklyn-based designer had solely been within the enterprise for 5 years. Now, one of many world’s high museums was asking for 2 of his designs to be proven in “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the exhibit launched by the starry Met Gala.
Agbobly grew up in Togo, watching seamstresses and tailors create stunning clothes in a part of the household residence that they rented out. Finding out trend later in New York, the aspiring designer watched the Met Gala carpet from afar and dreamed of at some point in some way being a part of it.
“Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” is the primary Costume Institute exhibit to focus completely on Black designers, and the primary in additional than 20 years dedicated to menswear. In contrast to previous exhibits that highlighted the work of very well-known designers like Karl Lagerfeld or Charles James, this exhibit consists of various up-and-coming designers like Agbobly.
“The range is phenomenal,” says visitor curator Monica L. Miller, a Barnard Faculty professor whose e-book, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” is a basis for the present.
“It’s super exciting to showcase the designs of these younger and emerging designers,” says Miller, who took The Related Press by the present over the weekend earlier than its unveiling at Monday’s Met Gala, “and to see the way they’ve been thinking about Black representation across time and across geography.”
The gala had already raised a report $31 million, Metropolitan Museum of Artwork CEO Max Hollein stated Monday — the primary time the fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute has crossed the $30 million mark and eclipsing final yr’s haul of greater than $26 million.
Defining dandyism
The exhibit covers Black model over a number of centuries, however the unifying theme is dandyism, and the way designers have expressed that ethos by historical past.
For Agbobly, dandyism is “about taking space. As a Black designer, as a queer person, a lot of it is rooted in people telling us who we should be or how we should act … dandyism really goes against that. It’s about showing up and looking your best self and taking up space and announcing that you’re here.”
The exhibit, which opens to the general public Might 10, begins with its personal definition: somebody who “studies above everything else to dress elegantly and fashionably.”
Miller has organized it into 12 conceptual sections: Possession, presence, distinction, disguise, freedom, champion, respectability, jook, heritage, magnificence, cool and cosmopolitanism.
How clothes can dehumanize, but additionally give company
The “ownership” part begins with two livery coats worn by enslaved folks.
Considered one of them, from Maryland, appears to be like lavish and elaborate, in purple velvet trimmed with gold metallic threading. The clothes had been supposed to point out the wealth of their house owners. In different phrases, Miller says, the enslaved themselves had been objects of conspicuous consumption.
The opposite is a livery coat of tan broadcloth, possible manufactured by Brooks Brothers and worn by an enslaved baby or adolescent boy in Louisiana simply earlier than the Civil Conflict.
Elsewhere, there is a up to date, glittering ensemble by British designer Grace Wales Bonner, fabricated from crushed silk velvet and embroidered with crystals and the cowrie shells traditionally used as foreign money in Africa.
There’s additionally a so-called “dollar bill suit” by the label 3.Paradis — the jacket sporting a laminated one-dollar invoice stitched to the breast pocket, meant to recommend the absence of wealth.
How gown can each disguise and reveal
The advertisements, Miller notes, would typically describe somebody who was “particularly fond of dress” — or word that the individual had taken giant wardrobes. The explanation was twofold: The flamboyant garments made it attainable for an enslaved individual to cloak their id. But in addition, once they lastly made it to freedom, they might promote the clothes to assist fund their new lives, Miller says.
“So dressing above one’s station sometimes was a matter of life and death,” the curator says, “and also enabled people to transition from being enslaved to being liberated.”
The up to date a part of this part consists of hanging embroidered jackets by the label Off-White that purposely play with gender roles — like displaying an ostensibly “male” jacket on a feminine model.
Views of an rising Black center and upper-middle class
Stopping by a set of portraits from the early nineteenth century, as abolitionism was taking place within the North, Miller explains that the themes are Black males who had been profitable, properly off sufficient to fee or sit for portraits, and dressed “in the finest fashions of the day.” Like William Whipper, an abolitionist and rich lumber service provider who additionally based a literary society.
They symbolize the beginnings of a Black center and higher center class in America, Miller says. However she factors out a gaggle of racist caricatures in a case proper throughout from the portraits.
“Almost as soon as they are able to do this,” she says, referring to the portraits, “they are stereotyped and degraded.”
Projecting respectability: W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass
W.E.B. Du Bois, Miller factors out, was not solely a civil rights activist but additionally one of many best-dressed males in turn-of-the-century America. He traveled extensively abroad, which meant he wanted “clothing befitting his status as a representative of Black America to the world.”
Objects within the show embody receipts for tailors in London, and swimsuit orders from Brooks Brothers or his Harlem tailor. There may be additionally a laundry receipt from 1933 for cleansing of shirts, collars, and handkerchiefs.
Additionally highlighted on this part: Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, author, and statesman and likewise “the most photographed man of the 19th century.”
The present consists of his tailcoat of brushed wool, in addition to a shirt embroidered with a “D” monogram, a high hat, a cane and a pair of sun shades.
Designers reflecting their African heritage
Considered one of Miller’s favourite objects within the heritage part is Agbobly’s bright-colored ensemble based mostly on the hues of luggage that West African migrants used to move their belongings.
Additionally displayed is Agbobly’s denim swimsuit embellished with crystals and beads. It is a tribute not solely to the hairbraiding salons the place the designer hung out as a baby, but additionally the earrings his grandmother or aunts would put on once they went to church.
Talking of household, Agbobly says that he in the end did inform them — and everybody — about his “pinch-me moment.”
“Everyone knows about it,” the designer says. “I keep screaming. If I can scream on top of a hill, I will.”
