“Starving for Beauty!”: Superfine Stories on Screen

Inspired by The Met Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition, Monica L. Miller, Guest Curator of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, has curated a series of films that expands on the idea of self-representation as a mode of distinction and resistance—a central theme that’s explored in the Museum’s galleries.

“All of these films capture, in very different ways, a tension that is inherent in fashioning Black masculinities—the fact that sometimes performances of race, gender, sexuality, and class enable the creation of an enabling sense of self; even as, in other moments, these same strategies of self-presentation destabilize and question that same self. ‘Beauty’ is, of course, in the eye (and at the mercy and judgement of) the beholder.” —Monica L. Miller, Guest Curator of Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University