Pharrell Williams will co-chair the Met Gala to explore black dandyism

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Singer and designer Pharrell Williams is among the co-chairs of New York's next Met Gala, which will explore race relations in the context of fashion, the museum announced Wednesday.

Rapper ASAP Rocky, actor and playwright Colman Domingo and Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton will co-headline the fashion industry's main event, which will be chaired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Basketball legend LeBron James will serve as honorary chairman.

The blockbuster evening and accompanying museum exhibition at the Met's Costume Institute comes five years after the enormous anti-racist uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, which forced a number of cultural institutions across the United States to confront their portrayal of race and racial diversity .

The Costume Institute's Spring 2025 exhibition is titled “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” and focuses on black men's style in the context of the complicated history of black dandyism.

The exhibition and theme are inspired by guest curator Monica Miller’s book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.”

Dandyism was a style forced upon black men in 18th-century Europe, the Met says, when well-dressed “dandified” servants became the trend.

The concept also evolved throughout history and in the diaspora as a means for black men to use style as a means of creativity, expression and identity.

Announcing the exhibition and theme on Wednesday, Williams — the creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton and a co-sponsor of the exhibition — emphasized the importance of celebrating cultures that emerged from the dark origins of slavery.

“As an artist who was literally born and raised in the shadow of the expansion of the African diaspora into the land that would later become America, celebrating an exhibition centered around black dandyism and the African diaspora is truly a joy for me “Coming full circle moment,” said Williams, a Virginia native.

“It’s literally a dream.”

Members of the black diaspora not only survived the horrors of slavery, he said, “but we carried the music, the culture, the beauty and the universal language across an ocean and across a quadruple century.”

The Met Gala, which traditionally takes place on the first Monday in May, was first organized in 1948 and was reserved for New York's high society for decades.

Wintour, the high priestess of US fashion, took over the show in the 1990s and turned the party into a catwalk for the rich and famous.

It's a fundraiser for the Costume Institute, but it's also a social media extravaganza where stars in over-the-top looks compete to create the biggest spectacle.

According to The New York Times, a dinner seat in 2024 would cost $75,000 and a full table would cost $350,000. Last year's edition raised around $22 million.

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