🔅 Black Designers Take Centre Stage at the Met Gala's 2025 Exhibit
Patwa and Gullah: African Roots in Action
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Inside the Met Gala's 2025 Exhibit: Black Designers Take Center Stage
When Jacques Agbobly got an email from the Met Museum, he assumed it had to be spam, because who gets emails from the Met after just five years in fashion? Turns out, Jacques does.
Agbobly, a Brooklyn-based designer originally from Togo, is one of the rising stars featured in this year's Costume Institute exhibit: "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style." This groundbreaking show, launching after the star-studded Met Gala, is the first ever devoted entirely to Black designers, and the first menswear-focused exhibit in over two decades.
Curated by Monica L. Miller, a professor whose book "Slaves to Fashion" explores Black dandyism, the exhibit celebrates designers who use style as a form of resistance, empowerment, and identity.
What's dandyism, anyway? For Agbobly, it means taking up space, which is especially important, he says, "as a Black designer and queer person constantly told how we should behave." And his designs celebrate his West African roots, highlighting colourful ensembles inspired by bags used by migrants, as well as embellished denim suits referencing childhood memories of hair salons and church.
The exhibit is divided into compelling themes like ownership, disguise, and respectability. A standout piece in the "ownership" section is a lavish purple velvet coat worn by an enslaved servant, highlighting how fashion historically represented status, often at the cost of dehumanization.
On the flip side, clothing also empowered and protected: In the "disguise" section, runaway enslaved people used fashionable wardrobes to mask identities or fund their escapes once they reached freedom. Today, designers like Off-White playfully challenge gender norms through fashion, demonstrating clothing's continuous role as a transformative tool.
The show also spotlights iconic Black figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, whose impeccable wardrobes were acts of self-definition and defiance. Receipts from Du Bois' global tailoring adventures and Douglass’ famously elegant attire emphasize how style projected respectability and challenged stereotypes.
"Superfine: Tailoring Black Style" opens to the public May 10 at the Met, and we’d love it if you sent us pictures if you manage to make it.
Patwa and Gullah: African Roots in Action
Jamaican Patwa is often brushed off as “broken English.” Spoiler alert: it’s anything but. Sure, it’s got English words (the British did colonize the place), but it also channels the grammar, rhythm, and vocabulary of West and Central African languages. Same goes for Gullah, the Creole spoken by the Gullah Geechee people in the Sea Islands stretching through Georgia and the Carolinas. In short, these are real languages with consistent rules, far-stretching histories, and distinct communities that grew them from scratch.
So how are they connected? First, they share a history of enslaved Africans forcibly shipped to the Americas, forced to talk to each other (and their owners) by mixing up mother tongues with colonial languages. Lo and behold, you end up with references to “nyam” or “nam” for “to eat,” or “oonu”/“unu” for “you all,” or that iconic Jamaican habit of adding “dem” to pluralize words (like “chair dem” for multiple chairs) also popping up in Gullah. It’s obviously not a coincidence, but rather centuries of cultural survival pinned onto everyday speech.
A delightful 1990s Nickelodeon show highlighted the cultural similarities: Gullah Gullah Island had Ron and Natalie Daise teaching songs and culture that, to a Jamaican ear, rang weirdly familiar. That unstoppable yellow frog? “Binyah Binyah.” A Jamaican might easily spin that into “wi bin deh yah” – “we’ve been here!” A single phrase, repeating across geographies, bridging the diaspora, and it just begs you to imagine the African diaspora as an ever-evolving piece of furniture with shared grammar, intonation, and intangible magic.
Governments might resist making these languages “official,” but the unstoppable stew of West African, colonial, and islandic expressions is still spoken in kitchens, markets, and backyards. And just like that old Binyah Binyah, these languages have been here and, with enough love, they’re not leaving anytime soon. More on this, here.
Africa’s Drone Craze: Cheap Airpower Is Taking Off, and So Are the Risks
Remember when only Hollywood villains had killer drones? Today, 31 African governments (and a growing list of rebel groups) have them on speed-dial. From Sudan to Mali, unmanned aircraft are rewriting the continent’s military playbook in record time.
Why the sky suddenly has so many drones:
Prices nosedived. You can now pick up a Chinese CH-4 or Turkish TB2 for about the cost of a mid-range battle tank’s paint job, and you don’t need a trained fighter pilot to fly it.
Middle powers smell opportunity. Türkiye leads the pack with 32 sales deals since 2021, muscling past the U.S. and China by offering “good enough” hardware without geopolitical lectures.
Homegrown is happening. Factories in nine African countries (from South Africa’s decades-old drone line to Tunisia’s robot exports) now crank out 12 percent of the continent’s unmanned kit.
So, does it actually win wars? Sometimes. Ethiopian forces used a multinational swarm of TB2s and Mohajers to push Tigrayan rebels back to Mekelle in 2022. But against guerrillas who melt into the bush, drones mostly swap one security headache for another: militants spread out, play hide-and-seek, and launch IED-dropping quadcopters in return.
The bill comes due: Last year alone Africa witnessed 484 drone strikes and 1,176 deaths. Sudan and the Sahel accounted for 84 percent of that, as rival juntas and their foreign patrons tried to out-drone each other.
And although drones promise “precision airpower on the cheap,” without boots on the ground that can hold territory or governments that can hold legitimacy, they mostly deliver a temporary edge – and a permanent escalation ladder. Nevertheless, Africa’s battlefields just got a lot busier at 10,000 feet.
Here’s the report.
Food for Thought
“A hungry stomach knows no law.”
— Mozambique Proverb
And the Answer is…
The photo is taken from Ile de Gorée, Senegal! You can also send in your own photos, alongside the location, and we’ll do our best to feature them.