For generations of Black men, dressing in a stylish fashion was not just about looking sharp. Against the backdrop of centuries of enslavement and discrimination, where people of African descent were continually stripped of their dignity and denied personal choices as basic as what to wear, style became a potent form of cultural defiance and self-expression. 

Sometimes it was enslaved people co-opting bits of finery for their Sunday church clothes. Or it was public figures like Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist author and orator, who dressed to command respect in a racist society that routinely denied it to Black men. In the early 20th century, luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance often dressed to display the racial pride, aspirations and creative energy of the self-described “new Negro” movement. Some of the most fashion-forward and playful of history’s self-styled Black men came to be described as “dandies.”

“A dandy’s look has always signified more than his excessive attention to style,” says Monica L. Miller, author of Slaves of Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity and guest curator of the exhibit “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has also long reflected “a real concern often in the Black community about respectability…the way respectability is so tied to the maintenance and the exercise of rights—and of being seen as proper people who are deserving of rights.” 

Clothing and textiles took on an outsized role in the Black diaspora between 1619 and 1808, when some 400,000 Africans were stolen from their homes and transported across the Atlantic to North America. It began when some European slave traders peddled bolts of fine cloth to African elders to buy Black captives, who were then often stripped naked and tightly packed into cargo ships.

 In Virginia, where race-based enslavement became law in 1661, slave auctioneers put African men, women and children up for sale in European clothes, to heighten their appeal to white buyers. But once relegated to laborer roles, most enslaved men were forced to wear coarse, homespun “Negro cloth." The South Carolina Negro Act of 1735, for example, legally dictated what enslaved people could wear by giving individual citizens the right to confiscate from Black people “any sort of garment or apparel whatsoever, finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth.”

Inside plantation communities, enslaved people found ways to express themselves during precious off-duty hours. Black domestic servants who sewed the wardrobes for their white enslavers were sometimes allowed to refashion castoff garments and salvage scraps, buttons and ribbons to create colorful, hybrid handicraft, says Miller. As Black folk strutted to Sunday church services dressed in a makeshift jumble of colors and patterns—some that echoed their African roots—they sometimes faced jeers from white onlookers, according to reporting by traveling journalist (and later landscape architect) Frederick Law Olmsted, who observed and interviewed white and Black people across the South in the 1850s. Caricatures from the time conveyed similar disdain.

Some of the earliest Black dandies had their fashion forced upon them. The burgeoning slave trade in the 18th century gave rise to an era of conspicuous consumption when many aristocrats purchased “luxury slaves,” young black boys who served as their personal attendants. Festooned in ornate brocades, gold collars and turbans with feathers, these dandyfied young Black servants were often regarded as accessories, says Miller, kneeling beside their enslavers in oil portraits.     

Enslaved manservants to the wealthy were often dressed to reflect their enslavers’ high social status. That included custom liveries, in fine fabrics, with braids and trimmings. The Historical New Orleans Collection acquired two rare examples of clothing worn by men enslaved by Dr. William Newton Mercer (1792-1874), a wealthy New Orleans surgeon who owned four cotton plantations near Natchez, Mississippi and enslaved more than 400 people, according to the museum’s decorative arts curator Lydia Blackmore. To dress his two enslaved valets, Mercer ordered finery from Brooks Brothers, the New York haberdasher: coats of silk and wool, with custom silver buttons flashing the same falcon crest used on the doctor’s family china. 

Gustave Badin Couschi had a luckier trajectory. Born enslaved around 1750, likely in the Virgin Islands, he was later gifted by a Danish sea captain to be a page to Queen Louisa Ulrika of Sweden. She freed him, fostered him alongside her children, gave him an aristocratic education and ultimately a position of high responsibility at court. A famous oil portrait shows him as a young man holding a chess piece and smiling, sporting a blue-and-black jacket with feathered epaulets, a broad white sash, delicate lace sleeves and a matching feathered hat. He went on to serve in an ambassadorial role, oversee three royal palaces, amass an impressive book collection and pen extensive personal journals. 

Perhaps the most storied 18th-century Black dandy was Julius Soubise (ca. 1754–1798) of London, a sartorial gadfly with oversized wigs and panache, who was both celebrated and ridiculed by the English elite. Enslaved in the Caribbean, Soubise was bought and gifted to the Duchess of Queensberry in London. The Duchess set him free, supplied him with a lavish education and supported his participation in fashionable pastimes such as fencing. Satirists caricatured Soubise in the press as “Mungo Macaroni,” a foppish clothes horse known for his fragrant boutonnieres, jaunty tricorne hats and canes. His notoriety coincided with minstrelsy, the entertainment fad of mainly white actors in blackface who made fun of brazen Black men such as Soubise. 

Free African Americans, while not in bondage, still struggled in the white-dominated society to gain respect. In colonial America, free Black tradesmen in the North held keen appreciation for the status and respectability that stylish attire gave them. In 1789, one of the first memoirs by a Black man was published, entitled: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself. The autobiography recounted Equiano’s capture in what is now Nigeria, at age 8, his sale to a British naval captain in the Caribbean and his journey into becoming a literate sailor, versed in trade and commerce. At 44 years old, after Equiano had saved enough to buy his freedom, he set aside 8 pounds to purchase “a suit of superfine clothes to dance with at my freedom.” On the inside cover of his memoir, Equiano is pictured as a distinguished gentleman in a ruffled lace shirt and high-collared jacket.

Elegant clothes provided social and sometimes literal currency for those seeking to escape to freedom. Some enslaved Black men stole their enslaver’s fine linen shirts and prized cut-away jackets with pewter buttons to trade for food as they traveled the Underground Railroad to freedom in the North. Other intrepid fugitives used fashionable clothes to evade capture by passing as free Black men and blending into local society. 

After the Civil War, Black Americans savored their newfound emancipation, marching in cities like Charleston and Richmond in Emancipation Day parades, where smartly dressed Black men in suits and ties with vests and bowler hats and women carrying parasols walked tall, cheering in the streets.  

Industrialization fostered a new era of riches, culture and sophistication—and conferred some measure of status on well-dressed Black men in the public eye. 

Haitian-born (and biracial) Alexandre Dumas, celebrated author of The Three Musketeers, was famous for being a French dandy in the early 19th century. He inherited his wardrobe, including leather pantaloons and other stylish military garb, from his father who had been the first Black general in the French army in 1793. Tall and long-legged, the swaggering teenage Dumas wrote at age 16, “I felt myself seized by the desire to look smart.” 

Two of the most famous Black intellectuals of the 19th century were the iconic abolitionist orator and publisher, Frederick Douglass, and the erudite Black activist and author W.E.B. Du Bois. While not "dandies" per se, both wore dignified, tailored wardrobes that telegraphed flair, confidence and freedom. Their images powerfully countered widespread media caricatures common during the Reconstruction era showing Black people as childlike or brutish, images used to justify segregation and racial violence. 

The commanding Douglass, who escaped from slavery and rose to international fame, became the most photographed man of the 19th century, sitting for more than 160 portraits. Acutely conscious that he was representing his race at a time when the nation was grappling with whether to free enslaved Black Americans and grant them the rights of citizenship, Douglass dressed for influence, favoring rakish, side-parted hair and smartly tailored three-piece suits.  

The first Black man to earn a Harvard University doctorate in 1895, Du Bois was the dandier of the two, flaunting flourishes like gloves, walking sticks and top hats. His assertive self-styling, on display on his international travels in London, Paris and Berlin, “intended to convey dignity and aesthetic refinement”—an expectation that “the wearer would be treated as he was dressed, gaining acceptance that would transcend race and advance the cause of racial uplift,” wrote Denise Murrell, curator at large at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”

By the 1920s, the era of the proud “New Negro” movement, Harlem became a mecca for artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals from across America, the West Indies and Africa to New York. Uptown, they fashioned a Black cultural mecca—and a fashion attitude that no longer relied on the white gaze for validation. 

In Harlem, Black men of means regularly dressed with elegance and refinement to impress each other, decked out and promenading in tailored suits—often pinstripe—made of luxury materials like silk and wool. They accessorized with fedoras, pocket squares and suspenders.

Collectively, they could have an arresting effect: After a spate of brutal racial violence in the Midwest in 1917, an estimated 10,000 African Americans marched down New York's Fifth Avenue on July 28, 1917, in the Silent Protest Parade. The first mass demonstration by Black citizens in the nation, it included large groups of Black men in suits, ties and straw hats—a vision of dignity and resilience, demanding equal rights as Americans.