SUPERFINE

It is June, which means coverage and commentary on what celebrities wore to the 2025 Met Gala has died down. Which makes it the perfect time to finally dig in to the real meat of the matter: the actual museum exhibit.

This week for STAR⟡MAIL, Laura Rocha-Rueda reviews the The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.

Laura Rocha-Rueda is the Brooklyn based Colombian fashion and fiction writer behind the Substack The Supernova. This week for STAR⟡MAIL, she reviews the The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.

Fashion’s Most Important Museum Exhibition in Years

By Lauren Rocha

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is an ode to craftsmanship and reinterpretation. It uses clothes to capture the history of the United States through the Black experience, an endeavor so ambitious it could only be achieved through the perspective of one specific style: in this case, dandyism. 

The exhibition is rich in history and style, highlighting brands like Wales Bonner (very popular on this year’s red carpet), Theophilio, LaQuan Smith, 3 Paradis, and Willy Chavarria, to name just some. While, to my delight, lots of Virgil Abloh was naturally featured, it didn’t feel like part two of Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”, the traveling exhibition from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago that was housed in the Brooklyn Museum in 2022-2023. Sponsored by Louis Vuitton, a not insignificant portion of Pharrell’s work for the brand is included. Off-White looks are also prominently displayed, including post-Virgil Ib Kamara work. While parts of the exhibition feel, at times, like a path through the eras of Louis Vuitton and Off-White, all one needs to do is turn a corner, or look another way, to realize the story being told is much, much broader. 

If anything, the show places Virgil Abloh’s take on Black dandyism and style as one interpretation in a sea of creative possibility. The other big soul that traverses Superfine is Andre Leon Talley, without whom Vogue wouldn’t be what it is today, and who understood Black dandyism perhaps better than anyone else. 

The historical pieces that the Costume Institute included in this year’s exhibition are remarkable: they step away from the vintage red carpet craze, where celebrity stylists pull archival pieces for the mere reason of items being exactly that, pulling from an archive because the piece is in an archive, and into some of the most historically meaningful clothes I have ever seen in an exhibit. Frederick Douglass’s “sharply tailored black jacket”, shirt, vest, cane, and tophat are featured prominently behind a glass pane, leaving the “fashion is art” realm and linking fashion to everything that matters: “the most photographed man of the nineteenth century” used style almost as a weapon, to “exude dignity.” 

And to that I say: more of this! I do not care what Karl Lagerfeld’s office looked like! Please never do that again.

As refreshing as it feels to have a Met Gala that doesn’t feel completely disconnected from the realities of our world, the event remains true to the lunacy that laces the fashion industry. It’s still dystopian in many ways,—the piece The Cut did about celebrities doing all sorts of beauty treatments and hacks to fit into their outfits was the greatest example of the absurdity that the event can’t escape—but the exhibition, as well as the theme for the Gala, has something to say this year. The exhibition feels ancestral: we must honor those who came before us. Never forget the path they carved for us, and do whatever we can to keep our movements humming, screaming along. 

One caveat: I found the music a bit loud and the room slightly too dark. With so much wonderful information to take in, I wished the experience felt  I will forever chase the high I felt when I saw Camp: Notes on Fashion in 2019 (but perhaps it helped that when I saw that one, I was a bit tipsy from cocktails from the Cantor Roof Garden Bar—which, by the way, will close for a remodel until 2030, so now is your chance!). Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is on view now and was extended, by popular demand, through October 26, 2025.  

Read more about the ethos guiding this years Costume Institute exhibiton. Superfine: Tailoring Black Style traces the complex and vibrant legacy of menswear across three centuries of Black culture:

Some of the best editorial styling I’ve seen in years:

The costume exhibition was heavily influenced by the late creative director and editor at large of Vogue magazine, André Leon Talley. Read this 2020 interview with the cultural icon: