The Metropolitan Museum of Art just unveiled its annual fashion exhibit, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” dedicated to Black dandyism. But who is the man who turns getting ready into a life philosophy, our gaze into his stage? As I dove into the theme’s history, a fuller, more decadent figure surfaced, one far more complicated than the immaculately dressed caricature I imagined. Deep in the contradictions of the dandy, Heji Shin’s hooded portrait of Kanye West, which was part of the 2020 show “No Dandy, No Fun” at Kunsthalle Bern, kept staring at me.
In recent years, midlife crisis ablaze, West seems to have plunged headfirst into Oscar Wilde’s old truth: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Yet somehow his spectacular descent feels less like a fall from grace than a deliberate performance of it. Then again, the dandy wasn't a saint either. He was a creature of contradiction, equal parts elegance and arrogance, an exquisite oxymoron of a gentleman. And so a question kept my cortex occupied: is Kanye the blueprint dandy of our time? Bear with me as I make my case. The dandy, that snarky, magnetic figure, emerged at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Before London gave us punk, it birthed an English anarchist dressed not in rips and studs, but a perfectly tailored frock coat and ruffles stiff with starch. He was an ironic little poser. Appearance wasn’t just vanity, it was rebellion. By placing obsessive importance on looks, he cultivated his clothes, his wit, his hobbies, into a living, breathing performance of aristocratic polish. Jean Baudrillard pointedly labeled dandyism in his seminal work Simulacra and Simulation as “an aesthetic form of nihilism”.
Picture a young man dressed well above his pay grade, dining out nightly, treating work like a moral failure. He made dressing his religion, rejecting overly ornate clothes in favor of an understated tailored look. His luxury wasn’t quiet; it was conspicuously niche. Perfect fit was what mattered.He reserved the right to extravagant acts and arrogant antics. He expressed truths, shared quietly by everyone, even if it meant stepping outside the bounds of good manners. He borrowed shamelessly from friends to fuel his lifestyle and had no intention of paying them back. Baudelaire said a true dandy must “live and sleep in front of a mirror.” But beneath the glamour, there were always cracks. Behind that cultivated elegance lurked a darker truth: emptiness, decay, and selfdestruction. Captured perfectly in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: the moment Dorian trades mortality for eternal beauty, the gentleman becomes a dandy. The dandy of today may wear Opium instead of huffing it, but the spirit remains unchanged. He lives for excess, recoils from morality, and finds salvation in controversy. Let’s not forget, both Gray and Wilde died ruined and alone as martyrs on the altar of beauty.
If the European dandy flirted with aristocratic pose and irony, the Black dandy turned style into subversion. In the face of systemic exclusion, fashion, once imposed on him to signify his owners’ status, became armor, an assertion of self-worth, elegance, and refusal to be invisible. Black dandies didn’t just perform refinement, they weaponized it and in that rewrote their own narrative. Zoot suits, sharply tailored Sunday bests, or the radical cool of Harlem Renaissance, all carried a loaded meaning: survival, rebellion, self-creation. Where white dandies mocked society, Black dandies demanded a place within it, or attempted to transcend it altogether.Throughout history, dandyism has never been static. Tailored suits evolved into spiked leather and tracksuits; immaculately polished brogues gave way to tabis and kiss boots. Today’s creature of looks no longer flaunts opulence. He drips in obscure antiluxury, garments so monastic they cost a fortune. The only constant - normcore is the dandy’s true enemy.
West’s obsessive cultivation of appearance, his relentless self-framing as “genius,” reflects a classic dandy trait: the creation of a myth so total it consumes the man. While the 19th-century dandy polished himself to metaphorically float above the masses, Kanye actually did it, he’s become the artwork itself. His monochromatic, dystopian uniforms aren’t trends, they’re scripture. For him, fashion isn’t seasonal, it’s sacred. He treats institutions, award shows, politics, and the press with open disdain, as he simultaneously demands their full attention. Instead of work, he takes on projects and collaborations, each one another brick in the mythology of Kanye. Even his bankruptcies, public breakdowns, and social media rants become essential parts of the narrative. His music, fashion, tweets, marriages, outbursts, they’re all pieces of a chaotic Gesamtkunstwerk.
Dandy always resurges in times of cultural breakdown, when old orders collapse and the future seems shapeless. The dandy, as beautiful as ever, hurls himself into vanity to rise above the ruins. Unlike me (or maybe you), he’s willing to wear his financial and moral recklessness as a badge of visionary suffering. Maybe it’s not just ego when he steals the microphone from an accomplished young woman to assert his taste as superior. Maybe he’s shouting at all of us, pointing at how absurd it is that art, culture, even politics, have been flattened into entertainment. Dandyism is a destructive, dazzling kind of sacrifice. A vanity so radical it reflects our collective failure back at us like a cracked mirror. The new dandy doesn’t perform polish; he embraces chaos. He becomes the spectacle. Dandy is Ye. Dandy are we.