Kiss my power. The fashionable stop to Trump

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Western style, which two centuries ago gave rise to anti-slavery campaigns from Boston (in revolutions, always avant-garde cities), today excludes the White House from the most important celebration of the year, the Met Gala. Then, we can say for as long as we want that an exhibition of black dandies in jackets and bowlers, freed slave style, sounds a bit hypocritical and says little about the rich African style and its real influence on the world west of Kinshasa, but let's give Anna Wintour credit for eight years of keeping faith with her refusal to allow the president to attend.

In December 1836, Anna and Lucia Weston, gentle Boston ladies, inaugurated an Antislavery Bazaar that aimed to raise funds for antislavery awareness campaigns and provide concrete aid to Africans deported to the southern states and willing to risk their lives to escape to the north. The diaries of the two sisters describe in detail the preparations, the mottos embroidered on pillows and pincushions, the books and essays written and sold, the finely tailored clothes put up for auction, but from the information also published in newspapers, archived at the Boston Public Library, it is clear that the economy of the project, not even too small or local given that the products were also sold in England and other European countries, was entirely female: embroiderers, cutters, managers, saleswomen, promoters. “Let it be remembered,” wrote one of the Westons in the advertisement published in “The Liberator” on 20 December 1844, “that this fair is mainly the product of female skill, toil and generosity.” Ability, hard work, generosity. Monday night, on this side of the Atlantic we had proof that, in the vast economy of fashion and without ever forgetting how much money it is worth, because in the end what matters is still the money you move and how and here we are talking about trillions, it is still women who hold the bar straight on rights. For whatever reason they do it, even if it is to keep healthy a system that, like that of fashion, is starting to slack off and must seek new commercial shores, they do it anyway, with skill and grace, and the derivative of these activities are in any case opportunities for peace, relaxation, inclusion. Earning money by surrounding yourself with smiling faces and people happy to spend on clothes and hats and to celebrate the “black style” and the “black dandies”, that is, the Western style revisited after the Freedom Act and also, in part, by the fabulous African sapeurs, is a fantastic result: the proceeds of the Met Gala 2025 were equal to 71 million dollars. Quite a few, for a dinner. Then, it remains to be understood by what reversal of meaning, the world leader of anti-Trumpism “kiss my ass”, racist and nationalist, has become Anna Wintour, a seventy-year-old English lady snobbish like Lucifer, who has been selling and writing about luxury for fifty years (a few more if we want to include the teenage years spent in the Biba boutique of Swinging London while her father directed the Evening Standard), but this is undeniable, however you want to look at it. While women, and men, of the chancelleries of the whole world, are wondering about the opportunity to meet the tenant of the White House and start negotiations about the duties and the immense damages they have already caused, Wintour categorically refuses to have anything to do with it, which also means inducing dozens of stylists not to dress the first lady Melania, and all the elegant circles of the world, which still count, indeed, it is not just the electorate of the American elegy and the slandri sweaters of JD Vance's mother, the world is big, to keep him as far away as possible. "He won't be invited again" said the global director of the editions of "Vogue" to James Corden's "Late Late Show" in 2017, in the first mandate area, after the first racist statements.

He kept his word, although there is no doubt that on Monday evening, in front of the flower-covered staircase of the Met, the main sponsor Louis Vuitton with Pharrell Williams, creative director of the men's line, must have shown a certain balancing act, if one considers that the patron of LVMH Bernard Arnault was among the guests of honor at Trump's inauguration ceremony in recent months, and that for years he has shouldered the huge losses of the manufacturing plant set up in Texas so that even the "Americans" could show the world that golden hands thrive among the farmers of the South and instead oops, forty percent of the production is wasted, a very high political price. If we wanted to look deeper, in this Met Gala there would be a fair number of other hypocrisies and other contradictions accumulated and in existence, starting from the title of the exhibition: “Superfine: tailoring Black Style”, precisely a celebration of Afro dandyism and the famous “sapeurs” of Kisnshasa and Brazzaville, taken from the essay by Monica L. Miller “Slaves to fashion: black dandysm and the styling of black diasporic identity”, published in 2009, and made more concrete, almost unavoidable, by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The curator of the Met exhibition, director Andrew Bolton, has been working on it for five years.

However. Without wanting to interrupt a global emotion at least as much as Wintour's power, are we absolutely sure that the Met Gala 2025 was a celebration of "black style", which on the red carpet was reinterpreted almost exclusively by European brands, therefore and inevitably "white" with the exception of names like Grace Wales Bonner who dressed Lewis Hamilton and who was a guest at Pitti Uomo in 2022 and not, instead and as written in the first lines, a clever repositioning strategy in times of crisis of European brands that, except in rare cases, see their turnover eroding and need to find new markets and new "communities" of reference? Miu Miu's reinterpretation of the style of Zelda Wynn Valdes, one of the few black designers of the 1930s and 1940s of great fame, for Gigi Hadid was certainly sensational, a gold lamé fourreau that crossed Instagram accounts all over the world in three hours, but apart from the appearance of Aimee Lou Wood in Ahluwalia and the involvement of Iké Udé, the chicest African-American artist of the moment, we did not seem to see the "dandy black" style represented as one would have expected. Few African designers, young or not and in any case not photographed, no effective support: only a group of black power stars, from Colman Domingo in a Valentino cape, in homage to the memory of André Leon Talley, to Lewis Hamilton and As$ap Rocky, dressed "superfine" by a WASP brand until the day before yesterday (with the due exception, it must be said, of Valentino, who already in the 1970s worked with the director of "Ebony" Eunice Johnson) and above all in their own roots. Then, some will see it as the victory of black power over brands that accompanied English and French explorers in their occupation exploration campaigns in Africa until the 1930s, the same lands that are now in China's sights, but the fact remains that very little has been seen of the colorful and undisciplined creativity of overseas, from Congo to Namibia, of the taste of the Zulu swenga in South Africa, of true black culture. Michelle Francine Ngonmo, founder and CEO of the Afro Fashion Association, which hosts an event in Milan every year where Wintour has never missed, on her Instagram account reported all the national "superfine", creators such as Ulrich Apex Mensfashion and Michel Datan.

But finding names from the segment that fashion calls “research” among the thousands of photos that have invaded the web was quite difficult. Many, instead, were amazed to see on display the checked suit from a famous photo by Arthur Elgort from 1988 and the famous monogrammed Vuitton trunks by André Leon Talley, the Gustave Flaubert specialist who for decades supported Wintour in the creativity of Vogue and who was fired because, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I had become too old and too fat”. The relationship between the two never fully healed. This presence sounds like a posthumous tribute.

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