What is the Met Gala 2025 theme? The event’s ‘Tailored For You’ dress code explained
Everything you need to know about the 2025 Met Gala.
The long-awaited dress code for the 2025 Met Gala has finally been announced – but some people are struggling to understand what it means.
2024’s dress code was Garden of Time which saw the likes of Kim Kardashian, Lana Del Rey and other stars posing on the red carpet at the New York event that’s widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious and glamorous fashion event.
This year, the theme has been revealed to be ‘Tailored for You.’
The organisers of the event have shared that the dress code is a nod to the costume exhibition the museum will be hosting: ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.’
The exhibit will ‘explore the role of sartorial style in forming Black identities, focusing on the emergence, significance, and proliferation of the Black dandy,’ according to the Met. It was inspired by guest curator Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.
But some people are finding the theme difficult to wrap their heads around.
The event’s theme is Superfine: Tailoring Black Style (Picture: Instagram) The co-chairs and host committee have also been announced (Picture: Instagram)X user @prty_grl_mantra wrote: ‘I’m still a little confused by this dress code, does it open space for women to wear luxurious dresses or can they only wear suits?’
@wineymarie agreed: ‘What does that mean?’
@glossyjeans posted: ‘Can someone explain to me how this will go? What do they wear?’
Here’s everything you need to know about the 2025 Met Gala.
What is the Met Gala?For those not in the know, the Met Gala is the annual haute couture fundraising festival held for the benefit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in Manhattan.
The event is hosted by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York City (Picture: F. M. Kearney/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)It’s become something of a who’s-who in the world of fashion and celebrity, and people from all over the world watch as famous faces arrive in outfits that range from bold to downright absurd.
The tickets to the event are extremely expensive, coming in around $75k last year. All of the money raised at the event goes towards the Costume Institute, which works to preserve fashion history and is among the most comprehensive archive of clothes in the world.
They have thousands of historical garments, such as a 1898 ball gown from House of Worth, founded by Charles Worth, who is widely considered the father of haute couture (high dressmaking).
Colman Domingo – one of the event’s c-chairs – is known for making fashion statements at the gala (Picture: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)As menswear expert Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) pointed out in an insightful X thread about the Gala: ‘The gala funds historical preservation, scholarship, and public education around fashion. The beautiful garments you see are also sometimes custom-made, which supports tailors and craftspeople. For these crafts to survive, craftspeople need customers.’
The Gala is also a star-maker, with attention grabbing outfits giving lesser-known names in the entertainment industry the exposure needed to take their careers to the next level (Zendaya was a favourite on the Met Gala carpet long before she was the household name she is now).
What is the 2025 Met Gala theme/dress code?As many people have pointed out, the theme of the 2025 Met Gala was actually announced months ago, but the guidance for the guests to interpret the theme was only just released, as well as the names of the people serving as chairmen of the Gala.
Vogue clarifies the theme in a recent article, explaining: ‘Tailored for You can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, but it mostly means embracing looks reflective of one’s personal style.
A dandy was a term that first arose in the 1800s (Picture: Heritage Images via Getty Images)‘We can surely expect inspired takes on suiting—from versions of the zoot silhouette popularized by jazz musicians in the 1940s to the bold, colorful styles worn by Congolese sapeurs—though other menswear staples, such as hats, ties, canes, brooches, and pocket squares, are likely to have a strong showing too.’
Monica L. Miller – whose book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity inspired the exhibition – wrote in a statement about the theme: ‘Dandyism can seem frivolous, but it often poses a challenge to or a transcendence of social and cultural hierarchies.’
She continued: ‘It asks questions about identity, representation, and mobility in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, and power. This exhibition explores dandyism as both a pronouncement and a provocation.’
Black dandyism had strong political undertones, particularly in the 20th century (Picture: Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)So how will all of those big words actually translate into clothing?
You can definitely expect a lot of menswear and jazz age inspired looks (think double breasted suits) as well as tributes to Black culture.
Gender-bending is certainly one of the themes at play here too, so celebrities will almost certainly take the event as an opportunity to play with their usual expressions of gender.
‘I feel that the show itself marks a really important step in our commitment to diversifying our exhibitions and collections, as well as redressing some of the historical biases within our curatorial practice,’ lead curator Andrew Bolton said in a statement. ‘It’s very much about making fashion at The Met more of a gateway to access and inclusivity.’
What is a Black dandy?The term Dandy first arose in the early 18th century as a term to describe middle-class men who loved the finer things in life, including social events, fine foods and wines, and luxuries like expensive clothes and interior decor.
It was a word that became associated with the creation of custom clothing (which is how custom tailoring ties into the Met’s theme), as Dandys tended to wear bespoke clothing made specifically to flatter them.
The exhibit and subsequent theme is inspired by Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Picture: Monica L Miller)However, the heart of Dandyism is not merely vanity, but the social and political awareness about how one is representing themselves through their appearance and clothing.
As Miller explains in her book: ‘When thinking about the dandy in general and the black dandy in particular, we must remember that the Oxford English Dictionary defines a fop from the 15th century as one foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress, or manners, and a dandy by 1780, as one who studies above everything else to dress elegantly and fashionably. Anyone in vogue without a parent strategy, but dandy’s commit to a study of the fashions that define them, and an examination of the trends around which they can continually redefine themselves.’
For Black men in the 20th century still living in the shadow of slavery, Dandyism became a way to assert one’s humanity and right to exist.
Some of these men began dressing with intention, style, and the desire to express themselves as both a way to assimilate into an oppressive culture and as a way to celebrate their freedom to choose.
As Miller explained in a 2022 interview, dandyism is deeply political: ‘The clothing practice that begins and flourishes in moments of political and cultural transition, dandyism is a powerfully interrogative phenomenon.
She continues: ‘It questions easy readings of and loyalties to race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, clothes-wearing men and women — what [Iké] Udé calls a luxurious deliberation of intelligence in the face of boundaries, and I love that phrase, especially in relationship to Andre Leon Talley.’
Dandyism also includes aspects of gender-bending fashion, as shown here by this 1930 photo of blues singer and pianist Gladys Bentley (Picture: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)The phenomenon changed in the 1920s as the Harlem Renaissance took root and some Black men’s version of dandyism took on more rebellious undertones.
They began to blend ‘high class’ and ‘white’ clothing styles of the day with elements of Black culture all their own, subverting the fashion of the oppressor in order to comment on their unjust position in the world and reclaim their power.
As Teen Vogue writes of the phenomenon: ‘We see it in the 1920s with Chitlin’ Circuit zoot suits, the 1970s with flashy Blaxploitation gangsters, the 1990s with monogrammed suits by Dapper Dan in Harlem, and even today on the runways of Pharrell Williams’ Louis Vuitton menswear collections.’
When is the 2025 Met Gala?Chaired by Anna Wintour since 1995, the event will take place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on May 5, 2025.
The event will be co-chaired with Anna Wintour and a group of influential and stylish Black men including Pharrell Williams and Lewis Hamilton (Picture: Getty Images)The exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style will be on view from 6 May until 26 October 2025.
Who will attend the 2025 Met Gala?While the guest list varies year to year, you can expect to see a huge number of A-listers at the event.
Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, A$AP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will co-chair the 2025 Met Gala, alongside honorary chair LeBron James.
A$AP Rocky’s role has been called into question amid his ongoing trial for gun charges, but so far, there has been nothing to suggest that Rihanna’s partner won’t be in attendance at the gala.
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