Four months ago, a text from Grace Wales Bonner popped up on FKA twigs’s phone: “Wanna come to the Met with me?” The invitation couldn’t have come from a more fitting host. The 2025 Met Gala doubles, after all, as the unveiling of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s exhibition based on Monica L Miller’s research into Black dandyism, a subject in which few modern designers are as immersed. “I read Monica’s book, Slaves to Fashion, while I was studying,” Bonner says, a couple of days before the event. “And it’s been 10 years since then, so it’s a full circle moment for that body of work to be acknowledged. The show feels like a celebration of everything that is important to me: elegance, refinement, the idea of embodied clothing and its power to transform.”

Bonner makes her debut on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this evening alongside Jeff Goldblum, Tyler Mitchell, Eric N Mack, Omar Apollo and, of course, Twigs, who didn’t hesitate to respond to her message with a “yes.” “I made clothing for Twigs quite early on in our careers, so we’ve known each other for a long time,” adds Bonner. “She’s so eloquent in the way she talks about the way she carries herself in the world, and I find her ease of physicality so inspiring.” While the duo could have drawn inspiration from any number of the Black aesthetes-about-town Bonner has previously taken as subjects–James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Sun Ra, Haile Selassie, (an outfit on which he was based appears on the cover of the “Superfine” catalogue)–it was the 1920s dancer Josephine Baker who informed tonight’s look: a deco, feather-trimmed cocktail dress of Swarovksi-scalloped organza, with a silk chiffon stole and custom Manolo Blahniks.

“When you think of dandyism, you think of tailoring,” says twigs, now sporting an ultra-short Eton crop for the occasion. “But I thought it would be an interesting challenge to subvert the suiting that Grace does so well. Josephine, like Eartha Kitt and Grace Jones, is the epitome of female dandyism.” Born in segregated Missouri in 1906, Baker was, by the time she fled to Paris in her 20s, the most celebrated cabaret artist of the Jazz Age: clowning against racist stereotypes in feathered loincloths and banana skirts onstage, while strolling around with a pet cheetah on a diamond leash offstage. “The perfect ingredient to all great art is an element of ‘stink’,” twigs adds. “That’s what Josephine had: an attitude which attracted and repelled. There’s space for glory and outrage, and that, I think, is what being a dandy is all about. Having the confidence to stand there and trigger and enlighten, and confuse and amaze through style. There is no diamond that could have outshone the one inside Josephine’s chest.”