Torkwase Dyson’s set design for ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ at The Met meditates on ownership, charisma and histories

For American artist Torkwase Dyson, approaching the set design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute exhibition ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ was far from an easy feat. It would take an encounter with American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ garments, among the centuries-spanning show’s highlights, to give the project form. ‘What connected me to the ideas of the pattern and the body was seeing his fabrics, comb, top hat, and coat,’ the New York-based artist tells Wallpaper*.

Dyson quickly settled on the idea of placing Douglass’ archives inside one of her signature trapezoid forms. The artist’s rhythmic geometry always stems from an architectural and corporal consciousness of abstraction. Here, however, the ‘very emotional’ addition of Douglass’ garments shrouds her recognisable structure with another veil of history and magnitude: ‘My hyper shapes come out of a study on the period of Black folks self-liberating from the catastrophes of slavery.’

Inside ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ at The Met

Grandiose but also grounding, the artist’s trapezoid is a mediation on geometry’s narrative potential, and in her mammoth-scale public sculptures, they often absorb their viewer. The late singer Prince’s lace-clad garment is also presented inside the same shape from Dyson’s mixed-media series, Everything That Will Save Me.

Dyson has exhibited her commanding pitch-black steel sculptures across the globe, from the Sharjah Art Biennial to Desert X in Coachella Valley and the rooftop of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Although the Chicago-born artist has no background in fashion, the laser-focused precision of her forms, similar to a maestro tailor’s impeccable cuts, speaks even louder than their physical hefts. In the design of the year’s one of the most anticipated fashion spectacles, she crafts a new layer – of narrative and of texture – into her forms, which commonly question the rigidity of systems, from the urban grid to Abstract art itself. ‘I clocked into how people have fashioned themselves as a manipulation of autonomy and ownership in which clothing is a resistance,’ says Dyson.

‘Ownership’ is one of six themes the show is divided into by its curator Monica L. Miller, the professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College and the author of the show’s inspirational book, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009). In fact, it is the show’s opening subject, the word encapsulating the complexities of slavery and racism, as well as the fight for autonomy. Presented inside Dyson’s dynamic semi-rounded box, a purple velvet coat and a wool shirt – both from the 19th-century American south and worn by enslaved people – complicate what ownership has meant across history. Contemporary Black designers, such as Wales Bonner, Jawara Alleyne, Ervin Latimer and LaQuan Smith carry ownership’s resonance towards grace and grandeur.

Dyson looks at the show’s central theme of dandyism as a conceptual catalyst while remaining true to what she calls her minimalist ‘tonal values’. Her touches seem to remain restrained in their demure abstraction, but similar to a dandy’s grand appearance, they promise an explosive revelation. From the formerly enslaved Londoner man-about-town Julius Soubise (who was among the men called ‘macaronis’ in 1770s England for their flamboyant fashions) to American Vogue’s legendary editor-at-large André Leon Talley, the Black dandy casts his unapologetic light across the garments and Dyson’s set design.

Besides texture, sound is another sensory stimulation Dyson explores this spring in New York City. Public Art Fund unveils this week the artist’s 20-foot-high steel and aluminium pavilion on the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Akua (2025), which salutes the downtown Manhattan silhouette across the river, is a pyramid-like form with soundscapes that the artist recorded nearby. In her explorations of the sensorial or sartorial, Dyson returns to the simple honesty of the line. Just like a designer’s arresting illustrations or an architect’s sketches, she transfers each stroke into a deliberate, concrete gesture.

‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ runs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute from May 10 2025 – October 2025. It is supported by Louis Vuitton.

Akua is open to the public until March 8, 2026.

metmuseum.org