Entertainment

At the Met Gala, women performed the dandy at its best — twisted, contorted and pumped

Published

12 months ago

May 6, 2025

Press Room

At the Met Gala, women performed the dandy at its best — twisted, contorted and pumped

Doechii in Louis Vuitton

(Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

The Met Gala is always something of a performance art spectacle. The 2025 edition was no different. What was unique was that it sought to celebrate not just clothes or ideas, but an entire culture. The Met Gala stepped outside the typical focus on couture womenswear to highlight men’s tailoring and the Black dandy as a historical figure.

But what is a dandy, exactly? A dandy is, simply, someone with an all-encompassing devotion to fashion, style and tidiness. Society has called these people fussy, or in more recent times, metrosexual. But the crucial element of dandyism is its antagonism toward class, race and sexual boundaries. This is especially crucial for Black people, who have and continue to use the trappings of fashion to signal success, self-worth and pride. That pride is, at many times throughout history, a subversive act.

US actor Colman Domingo arrives for the 2025 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 5, 2025, in New York.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 05: Jeremy O. Harris attends the 2025 Met Gala

In the introduction to her book “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” Monica L. Miller (who was a guest curator for the accompanying exhibition at the Costume Institute) says that “Black dandyism has always been practiced by those interested in much more than materialism and the latest style.” She goes on to say that dandyism is a “truly radical kind of freedom, accessible perhaps only through a constant, playful, yet studied change of clothes.” It is, as she says, both appropriation of the trappings of the upper class and a challenge to the order they’ve subjected the world to.

“Slaves to Fashion” is a dense book, filled with history and reference. It looks back at the novelty of slaves wearing finely tailored clothes, which it connects to the explosion of Blackness and queerness in the Harlem Renaissance. The thesis (and ultimate challenge) of the book is drawing a straight line between an enslaved Black child in elaborate clothes far beyond his station in life to a modern hip-hop celebrity like Andre 3000. To Miller, both the slave and the star are examples of Black identity and masculinity transcending the boundaries and barriers set up around them by society. Blackness itself becomes a performance, a concept invented by those who sought to turn Africans into an other. And a performance almost always requires the appropriate uniform.

While the theme of this Gala might have leaned more toward men, that didn’t prevent women from finding a way to creatively connect to it, as the dandy’s role is to perform an exaggerated form of masculinity — twisted, contorted and pumped. Zendaya’s creamy white Louis Vuitton suit popped for its elegant, understated tailoring. Doechii, also rocking Vuitton, went for a more outre LV-monogrammed suit and trouser shorts with a maroon bow tie. Wide shoulder pads on Alton Mason, Doja Cat, Lupita N’yongo and Teyana Taylor recalled the broad, hyper-male suits one might see on a Sunday trip to church.

And then there were the hats. Whoopi Goldberg’s Thom Browne outfit was punctuated by a hat that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Victorian-era dandy intellectual. Singer and actor Janelle Monáe’s Thom Browne fit included a contrasting color suit, hat, monocle and cape adorned with the outline of a totally different suit splashed across it. Multiple suits, to be exact — a pinstripe and a plain navy blazer with white piping. It was a Russian nesting doll of menswear, with allusions to every tool in Browne’s prodigious toolbox of suiting. This is masculinity as posturing, as provocation and as protection. Presenting masculine symbols while tweaking them or reappropriating them is a potent subversion of the norm.

The Met Gala — a lavish, invite-only party that gathers the most famous people in the world for one night to raise money for the arts — is far from subversive. Instead, it’s a worldwide announcement about who matters most, who is affecting society most deeply, and who has the money to attend. It is inherently about the establishment. The men wearing the luxurious suits Monday were not breaking class barriers. The clothes on display were not accessible to the masses. In many cases, the outfits were bespoke, custom and never to be replicated.

But it would be too easy to dismiss the Met as some sort of “Hunger Games”-like spectacle of wealth. The idea of Black dandyism goes beyond extreme displays of status. It means that you care — about how you look, but also about yourself. In an interview with GQ about the Met, legendary designer Dapper Dan described how he became a dandy. “I’m from the poorest neighborhood in Harlem, right by the banks of the Harlem River. Everybody in my little enclave was all poor. We had rats and roaches. Goodwill was our Macy’s. Whenever I was lucky and fortunate enough to have something to wear, I went to 125th Street. Nobody went there who wasn’t dressed. At 125th Street, nobody knew I had rats, nobody knew I had roaches, and that for me was the birth of dandyism because I saw the power of transformation that could take place with your clothes.”

Brian Tyree Henry attends the 2025 Met Gala Celebrating "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style"

Alicia Keys, left, and Swizz Beatz, both wearing Moncler.

This year’s Met Gala theme allowed the spectator to think not just of the clothes, but what those clothes mean to them and to the wearer. To dress up is to project power, possibility and preeminence. A Black person dressing up for church can reclaim their place in the cultural hierarchy as much as a hip-hop star uses clothes to signal their wealth. The table sponsored by Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God label spotlighted Black celebrities as disparate as filmmaker Ryan Coogler and artists Amy Sherald and Lauren Halsey. Their outfits, many of them custom by the house, were as challenging and avant-garde as anything the fashion establishment has to offer. Coogler and actor Adrien Brody both wore broad-shouldered suits paired with T-shirts and more formalist cummerbunds — a house style of Fear of God. As always, Lorenzo is more than happy to muss up the expected, to push the boundaries while still respecting the core traditions of the art form.

Artist Lauren Halsey wearing Fear of God.

What defines dandyism is a willingness to play by a set of rules, whatever those might be for the time and temperature of the world around it. While the celebrities in these clothes aren’t explicitly transgressive figures, their presence in this world of high status is in a sense a form of transgression. Their mere existence in a place like the Met Gala signals that there is a sliver of an opening to greatness, no matter how small it might look in the moment. There will always be that spirit of Dapper Dan at Goodwill to hold on to, and that style is not about how much the clothes cost, but what it says about the person wearing them.

Myha'la Herrold, left, and Raul Lopez of LUAR.

Laura Harrier wearing Ecru Gap, left, and Zac Posen.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – Desert Warrior (2026)

Published

1 hour ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Desert Warrior, 2026.

Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley, Ghassan Massoud, Sharlto Copley, Sami Bouajila, Lamis Ammar, Géza Röhrig, Numan Acar, Nabil Elouahabi, Hakeem Jomah, Ramsey Faragallah, Saïd Boumazoughe, and Soheil Bostani.

SYNOPSIS:

An honorable and mysterious rogue, known as Hanzala, makes himself an enemy of the Emperor Kisra after he helps a fugitive king and princess in the desert.

With aspirations of being a historical epic harkening back to the sword and sandal blockbusters of yesteryear, Rupert Wyatt’s seventeenth-century Arabia tale is about as generic and epically dull as one would expect from a film plainly titled Desert Warrior. Yes, there appear to be real locations here, and there are some admittedly sweeping shots of various tribes storming into battle on horseback and camels, but it’s all in service of a mess that is both miscast and questionable as the work of a filmmaking team of mostly white creatives.

The story of Emperor Kisraa (Ben Kingsley, a distracting presence even with only one or two scenes) rounding up women from other tribes to be his concubines, which inevitably became the catalyst for a revolution led by Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart), uniting all the divided clans and strategizing battle plans for flanking and poisoning, is undeniably ripe for cinematic treatment. The problem is that what’s here from Rupert Wyatt (and screenwriters Erica Beeney, Gary Ross, and David Self) is less than nothing in the primary creative process; no one seems to have a connection to Arabic heritage or culture, but they have made a flat-out boring film that is often narratively incoherent.

Following the death of her father and escaping the clutches of oppression, the honorable Princess Hind joins forces with a troubled, nameless bandit played by Anthony Mackie (he totally belongs here…), who seems to be here solely to give the movie some star power boost without running the risk of white savior accusations. Whatever the case may be, it’s jarring, but not quite as disorienting as how little screen time he has despite being billed as the lead and how little characterization he has. It is, however, equally disorienting as some of the other names that show up along the way.

As for the other factions, Princess Hind talks to them one by one, giving the film an adventure feel that fails to capitalize on using beautiful scenery in striking or visually poignant ways at almost every turn; the leaders of these tribes also often have no character. There also isn’t much of an understanding of why these tribes are at odds with one another. This movie is filled with dialogue that consistently and shockingly amounts to vague nothingness. Nevertheless, each tribe doesn’t take much convincing to begin with, meaning that not only is the film repetitive, but it’s also lifeless when characters are in conversation.

That Desert Warrior does occasionally spring to life, and a bloated 2+ running time is a small miracle. This is typically accomplished through the occasional fight scene between factions that also serves to demonstrate Princess Hind coming into her own as a warrior. When the tribes are united in a massive-scale battle, and that plan is unfolding step by step, one certainly sees why someone would want to tell this story and pull it off with such spectacle. However, this film is as dry as the desert itself.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Entertainment

Eddie Murphy’s son and Martin Lawrence’s daughter welcome first child: ‘That baby gonna be funny!’

Published

3 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Eddie Murphy’s son and Martin Lawrence’s daughter welcome first child: ‘That baby gonna be funny!’

Eddie Murphy is celebrating not just his lifetime achievement award, but also the arrival of his third granddaughter, perhaps the funniest baby alive.

Murphy’s son Eric and Martin Lawrence’s daughter Jasmin have welcomed their first child together, baby Ari Skye.

On Saturday, Murphy was honored with the 51st AFI Life Achievement Award at a gala in Hollywood and told reporters that he had recently celebrated back-to-back milestones.

“I just had my first grandson two months ago, and I had my third granddaughter two weeks ago. And I turned 65 a month ago,” he told “Entertainment Tonight” ahead of the gala. “It’s raining blessings on me.”

The ceremony celebrated his storied career across comedy and film, and featured tributes from fellow funnyman Dave Chappelle and “Shrek” co-star Mike Myers. The special will premiere May 31 on Netflix.

The “Dr. Dolittle” star also gushed about his new grandbaby to E! News, and told the outlet that being honored for his work was “a wonderful thing” but that his legacy wasn’t his work.

“My legacy to me is my children,” he said.

Asked whether he or Lawrence offered their kids any parenting advice as they prepared to welcome Ari Skye, Murphy said he’s more of a lead-by-example kind of dad.

“You don’t give advice like that,” he told the outlet. “Your kids don’t go by your advice. Your kids go by the example you set. They watch you. Stuff you be saying, they don’t even pay that no mind. They watch and see what you do.”

In March, Jasmin and Eric posted photos from their lavish baby shower on social media. The shindig included a three-tiered pink cake, pink cocktails garnished with meringue that looked like clouds and balloons galore. “The most beautiful and special celebration for our baby girl,” the couple captioned the post. “Thank you to our parents and everyone that made this day so magical! Ari Skye Murphy, you are SO loved already!!”

Excitement around Ari Skye’s arrival had been brewing in the media long before the couple even announced they were expecting. Murphy joked about a potential grandbaby when Jasmin and Eric were dating back in 2024, during an interview with Gayle King.

“They’re both beautiful,” he said. “They look amazing together. And it’s funny — everybody’s like, ‘That baby gonna be funny!’ Like our gene pool is just going to make this funny baby.”

Murphy agreed, saying: “If they ever get married and have a child, I’m expecting the child to be funny.”

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: ‘Agon’ is a Somber Meditation on the Athletic Grind

Published

13 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Movie Review: ‘Agon’ is a Somber Meditation on the Athletic Grind

Director: Giulio BertelliWriters: Giulio Bertelli, Pietro Caracciolo, Pietro CaraccioloStars: Yile Vianello, Alice Bellandi, Michela Cescon Synopsis: As the fictional Olympic Games of Ludoj 2024 approaches, Agon shows the stories of three athletes as they prepare and then compete in rifle shooting, fencing and judo. In his contemplative and visually rigorous film Agon, director Giulio Bertelli