A young Black boy, wearing deep red livery with gold trimming, a gold earring, and red-and-white turban secured with a jeweled brooch, stares out at the viewer. Standing before a ship at sea, he hands a letter, addressed to “Monsieur le chevalier de Rohan, captain of the King’s ships at Rochefort,” to an older white man, dressed in regal-looking steel armor. Painted in 1758 by the workshop of Jean-Marc Nattier, this portrait commemorates Louis-Armand-Constantin de Rohan’s promotion to captain of the Raisonnable. This double portrait, featuring the naval officer and his enslaved servant, whose silver collar signifies his bondage, is an early example of a Black dandy, dressed by his owner in elegant garb. (A common motif in this type of 18th-century painting, the metal collar identified who an enslaved person belonged to in case of escape.) Researchers have identified the young sitter as Roch Aza, who was ten years old when he was taken from Martinique to France in 1753 and subsequently enslaved by the noble Rohan-Guéméné family.
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At the height of the transatlantic slave trade, a new trend emerged in European painting in which depictions of well-dressed Black figures began appearing, alongside their enslaver, as a form of social currency. In addition to other signifiers of wealth and status, the added Black figure shows the white sitter as both a man of power and an aesthetic trendsetter. This pictorial motif quickly became de rigueur in the collections of European royalty, aristocracy, landed gentry, and even the wealthy merchant class who often benefited financially from slavery as traders or financiers.
“The fashionable presence [of Black sitters] enhanced the perceived cosmopolitanism of the [white] sitter, a visual shorthand for their access to empire, foreign goods, and control over other bodies,” Kofi Iddrisu, an archivist and founder of Ghana-based Archive Africa, told ARTnews. However, although Black sitters are included in these portraits, their faces are often obscured or shown from a side profile. Their rendering as secondary figures in this genre served as a painterly way to further dehumanize them.
The Roch Aza portrait is but one example of how this genre of well-dressed Black men emerged in art, and it is around a dozen paintings, alongside fashions, works on paper, historical and contemporary photography, sculpture, and decorative objects, included in “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Met Costume Institute’s much-anticipated spring exhibition that looks at over 300 years of Black dandyism. Opening to the public May 10 and the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala, the exhibition is a landmark, tracing the roots of contemporary Black male style to this era and showing how generations since have subverted what was once a signifier of enslavement.
The transatlantic slave trade altered the wealthy’s consumption and spending habits: while goods extracted from European colonies, like coffee, sugar, chocolate, and tea, were regarded as luxury items, so too were enslaved Black people. Fashion, made from textiles and finery also sourced from the colonies, became one way for the European elite, at home and in the Americas, to vaunt their status. Dressing their enslaved servants to match became an extension of this practice, so much so that they became known as “luxury slaves.” This assertion of affluence and whiteness would soon become subsumed in the portraits they commissioned.
“Artists were working very consciously about having this relational representation of whiteness, blackness, the European and other,” Melissa Baksh, an independent art historian who has studied the history of colonialism in European painting, told ARTnews.
Similar to the Roch Aza portrait is another painting included in “Superfine,” in which the Black subject is even more finely dressed though presented by himself. Hyacinthe Rigaud’s Portrait d’un jeune homme noir (1710–20) shows a young Black man in green silk, a swath of velvet, a white turban, and metal collar. He is an individual, but still deemed by his master a form of property. Compare that to Charles Goring of Wiston and an Unknown Attendant (ca. 1765), previously attributed to Johan Joseph Zoffany, which is not included in the Met exhibition but currently on view in “In a New Light: Five Centuries of British Art,” at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Like “Superfine,” this permanent collection show examines paintings from this period from a contemporary lens.
A double portrait of country domesticity, the Charles Goring painting shows a finely dressed Black servant in a navy-blue wool coat and red waistcoat who delivers a woodcock to his master after a successful shooting expedition. With his other hand, holding a tricorn hat, he pats the shoulder of the gentleman who looks at him with warmth. Yet, despite this relaxedness, there is still a clear racial hierarchy in which the young servant, whose name is still unknown, acts as a go-between between his master and the spaniel that fetched the bird.
That all three Black sitters are depicted wearing turbans, a nod to the influence of Orientalism, further shows them as an “exotic other,” a spoil of their European masters’ colonialist endeavors. This art historical tradition gave 18th-century white audiences “something novel to see—a form of entertainment like seeing a parrot at a zoo,” said Chiedza Mhondoro, an assistant curator of British art at Tate Britain.
The Black figures in their extravagant and exotic outfits, dressed like toys with very little agency, are both objects of mockery and splendor for their owners, as stated by Mhondoro. This is seen in the „Superfine: Tailoring Black Style“ exhibition at the Costume Institute in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Historian Monica L. Miller’s book, „Slaves to Fashion,“ explores the cultural history of Black dandyism, tracing its origins from 18th-century England to its contemporary forms of expression.
„Superfine“ delves into the complexities of Black dandyism across various themes, highlighting its role in challenging social hierarchies. Figures like Olaudah Equiano used dandyism as a means of self-fashioning and reclaiming agency. Abolitionist leaders like Equiano and Fredrick Douglass repurposed the visual codes of aristocracy to assert their humanity and intellect.
However, depictions of Black dandies could also take on racist undertones, as seen in paintings like „Untitled (African American Musicians)“ by George Washington Mark. The exhibition also showcases the luxurious military garb worn by revolutionary figures like Toussaint L’Ouverture, highlighting the evolution of Black dandyism over time.
The life of Julius Soubise, a prominent 18th-century Black British dandy, is also explored in „Superfine,“ shedding light on the privilege and celebrity status he attained within the upper class. The exhibition examines how Black dandyism has been portrayed in art and literature, from celebratory depictions to racist caricatures. Diese spöttischen Begriffe machen deutlich, dass Soubises übertriebene Persönlichkeit in einer starren Gesellschaft mit strengen Rangordnungen als über seinem Stand angesehen wurde.