New York – When email came from the Metropolitan Art Museum, Jacques Agbolly at first did not believe it.
Brooklyn -based fashion designer had only been in the business for five years. Now, one of the world’s main museums was asking that two of his designs were displayed in “Superfine: Black style adaptation”, The exhibition released by The Starry With gala.
“I was messy with emotion,” Agbobly said in an interview. “I had to verify to make sure that it was an official email. And then the emotion came, and I thought … Is it allowed to say something to someone about it?”
A goodly grew in Togo, seeing seamstresses and tailors create beautiful garments in part of the family home they rent. Studying fashion later in New York, designer’s candidate saw the Met gala carpet from afar and dreamed of some way to be part of it.
“Superfine: Sastoring Black Style” is the first exhibition of the costume institute that focuses exclusively on black designers, and the first in more than 20 years Dedicated to male clothes. Unlike the past programs that highlighted the work of very famous designers such as Karl Lagerfeld Or Charles James, this exhibition includes a series of promising designers like Agbobly.
“The range is phenomenal,” says Guest Curator Monica L. Miller, Professor of Barnard College whose book, “fashionable slaves: Black dandyism and the style of black diastic identity,” is a basis for the show.
“It is very exciting to show the designs of these younger and emerging designers,” says Miller, who took a reporter during the program during the weekend before his presentation at the MET Gala on Monday, “and see the way they have been thinking about black representation through time and geography.”
The exhibition covers the black style for several centuries, but The unifying theme is dandyismAnd how designers have expressed that ethos throughout history.
For Agubly, Dandyism is about “carrying space. As a black designer, as a queer person, much of this is rooted in people who tell us who we should be or how we should act … Dandyism really goes against that.
The exhibition begins with its own definition: someone who “studies above all others to dress elegantly and modernly.”
Miller has organized it in 12 conceptual sections: property, presence, distinction, costume, freedom, champion, respectability, jook, heritage, beauty, great and cosmopolitanism.
The property section begins with two layers of free, used by slaves.
One of them, from Maryland, looks luxurious and elaborate, in purple velvet trimmed with golden metal threads. The garments intended to show the richness of their owners. In other words, says Miller, slaves themselves were elements of conspicuous consumption.
The other is a ClubLoth Libyan coat, probably manufactured by Brooks Brothers and used by a enslaved or adolescent child in Louisiana just before the civil war.
In other places, there is a contemporary and brilliant set of the British designer Grace Wales Bonner, made of crushed silk velvet and embroidered with crystals and the Cowrie shells historically used as currency in Africa.
There is also a call “dollar ticket” of the label 3. Paradis: the jacket that wears a laminated ticket of a dollar sewn in the pocket of the chest, destined to suggest the absence of wealth.
The disguise section includes a 19th -century newspaper advertisement collection that announces rewards for catching fugitive slaves.
The ads, Miller points out, often described someone who was “particularly fond of dress,” or observes that the slave had taken large cabinets. The reason was double: elegant clothes made it possible for a slave to turn on his identity. But also, when they finally came to freedom, former slaves could sell clothes to help finance their new lives, says Miller.
“Then, dressing above the station of one was sometimes a matter of life and death,” says the curator, “and also allowed people to make the transition from being slaves to be released.”
The contemporary part of this section includes surprising jackets embroidered of the off-white label that plays with gender roles deliberately, such as showing a seemingly “male” jacket in a female mannequin.
Going through a set of portraits of the early nineteenth century, since abolitionism was happening in the north, Miller explains that the subjects are black men who succeeded, well enough to commission or sit for portraits, and dresses “with the best fashions of the day.” Like William Whipper, a abolitionist and rich wood merchant who also founded a literary society.
They represent the beginnings of a high and a half high black class in the United States, says Miller. But she points to a group of racist cartoons in a right case in front of the portraits.
“Almost as soon as they can do this,” she says, referring to the portraits, “they are stereotyped and degraded.”
Web Du Bois, Miller points out, was not only a civil rights activist but also one of the best dressed men in America at the beginning of the century. He traveled widely abroad, which meant that he needed “clothes according to his state as representative of black America to the world.”
The objects on the exhibition include receipts for tailors in London and orders of Brooks Brothers suit or its Harlem tailor. There is also a 1933 laundry receipt for cleaning shirts, necklaces and scarves.
Also highlighted in this section: Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, writer and statesman and also “the most photographed man of the nineteenth century.”
The show includes its brushed wool restart, as well as a shirt embroidered with a “D” monogram, a glass hat, a cane and a pair of sunglasses.
One of Miller’s favorite articles in the “Heritage” section is the set of bright colors of Agbobly based on the tones of the bags that the migrants of Western Africa used to transport their belongings.
The agbobly denim adorned with crystals and accounts is also shown. It is a tribute not only to the hairdressing halls where the designer spent time when he was a child, but also the earrings that his grandmother or aunts would use when they went to church.
Speaking of family, Agbly says that he finally told them, and all, about his “pinched moment.”
“Everyone knows,” says the designer. “I’m still screaming. If I can shout at the top of a hill, I will.”
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