Increasing the Lens – The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork

Last October, together with The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, we printed “Behind the Seams,” wherein we highlighted key assets inside The Costume Institute Library’s assortment that explored Black dandyism and Black type. Though Superfine has now closed, this put up presents a continued and expanded dialog, highlighting much more library choices associated to the exhibition’s key themes with a give attention to continental Africa. While Superfine primarily explores designers of the African diaspora—principally within the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Caribbean—Black dandyism is a worldwide dialog. These books discover how Black vogue and self-expression are formed, interpreted, and celebrated throughout various cultures and areas.

Africa Fashion was printed to accompany the acclaimed exhibition of the identical title curated by Dr. Christine Checinska on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2022–23. Both the e-book and the exhibition discover how vogue in Africa has lengthy influenced and formed world type, from the Fifties to the current. The e-book spotlights pioneering designers akin to Shade Thomas-Fahm, Chris Seydou, Kofi Ansah, and Nina Gessous, whereas additionally celebrating a brand new era of African creatives, together with Lisa Folawiyo, Gouled Ahmed, AAKS, and Ami Doshi Shah. Filled with insights from designers, historians, and cultural specialists, Africa Fashion provides a vibrant and nuanced portrait of right now’s most dynamic and forward-thinking vogue scenes on the African continent and its diaspora. Checinska additionally served on Superfine’s advisory board.

Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style by Shantrelle P. Lewis was printed in 2017 and celebrates the people, designers, tailors, and photographers decoding, defining, and documenting the colourful subculture of Black dandyism in modern artwork and vogue. The e-book examines how this motion is reshaping concepts of Black masculinity and vogue by itself phrases, a follow-up to Lewis’s Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity exhibition on the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in 2015. Organized into 4 sections—Movements, Destinations, and Happenings; People and Personalities; Designers and Tailors; and Photographers—the quantity presents a superbly curated assortment of images that spotlight the dazzling patterns, daring poses, and fearless self-expression that make Black dandyism a robust world assertion of fashion and identification. Lewis explains, “What makes a Black dandy a Dandy Lion is his subtle and not-so-subtle resistance to the status quo, his desire to set himself apart—not to place himself above his sagging-pants peers, but to defy the limiting expectations imposed by media stereotypes.”

Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo (2020) by British photographer Tariq Zaidi paperwork the colourful vogue subculture of the “Sapeurs” and their feminine counterparts, the “Sapeuses,” within the Congo. Zaidi juxtaposes their impeccable type with the landscapes of their low-income communities, highlighting “their defiance of circumstance through the stark contrast between the elegance of their dress and the harsh backdrop of their surroundings.” These placing type icons rework from their on a regular basis roles—taxi drivers, housewives, and different strange professionals—into immaculately dressed dandies after work. Although the motion has historically been male-dominated, a rising variety of Congolese girls and youngsters (usually known as “mini sapes in training”) are embracing the tradition, often sporting customized or designer fits. Families of Sapeurs are celebrated like native celebrities, admired for bringing pleasure and inspiration by vogue accessible to all. Each {photograph} features a credit score line noting the topic’s title, background, years as a Sapeur, and the manufacturers featured of their ensemble.

For the manufacturing of the mannequins featured in Superfine, we engaged the experience of up to date artist Tanda Francis, from whom we commissioned a bespoke model head design. Her visionary sculptures of monumental African faces that adorn public areas throughout New York and past tackle untold histories and the absence of Black folks in public artwork. Our collaboration produced fruitful alternatives to additional weave the themes of embodiment and illustration into the very design of the exhibition itself. Drawn to the lengthy historical past of La Sape, Francis discovered inspiration within the face of Congolese anti-colonial activist André Matswa. Matswa, who within the early twentieth century coupled his political activism with a wardrobe of trendy French gown from time spent in Paris, is taken into account by many to be a forefather of the Sapeur motion. Grounded by this historical past, Francis imbued an abstracted likeness of Matswa into the face of the Superfine mannequins. The consequence was a design with a definite but common high quality. Three heads that seem within the exhibition have the added element of two-dimensional planes, faces in profile, that radiate outwards in a 360° formation (as seen within the artist’s 2021 work RockIt Black). According to Francis, this element is consultant of the multiplicity of Black diasporic identification and the open pages of a e-book. While Superfine focuses primarily on designers and objects from the African diaspora, Francis’s layered design subtly interpolates the legacy and tradition of the Sapeur motion into the world of the exhibition.

Studio Volta Photo (2018) is a limited-edition e-book, produced in a run of simply 5 hundred copies with risograph-printed pages. The particular model we’ve in our assortment additionally features a signed and numbered gelatin print and is housed in a slipcase. Created to accompany Sanlé Sory’s debut gallery exhibition at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York, the e-book options never-before-seen photographs from Sory’s archive of classic studio portraits taken between the Sixties and Eighties. It’s a uncommon view into the photographer’s intimate and highly effective physique of labor.

The books mentioned right here supply only a small glimpse into the wealth of assets inside The Costume Institute Library that heart views about Black vogue and magnificence on the African continent and past. To discover our holdings additional, do a key phrase seek for “Superfine” in Watsonline, view the digitized exhibition checklist (PDF), and the suggested catalog reading list (PDF). Materials from our vogue library assortment may be requested and seen within the Thomas J. Watson Library. Please take a look at our web site for extra details about The Costume Institute’s Irene Lewisohn Costume Reference Library, archives, and particular collections. For extra updates on new acquisitions and examples of our vogue library assortment, please comply with us on Instagram at @costumeinstitutelibrary and @metcostumeinstitute.