Anna Wintour will celebrate the exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” — a deep look at designers of color, with a specific focus on Black men’s style — at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this evening alongside the Met Gala’s co-chairs Colman Domingo, Pharrell Williams, ASAP Rocky and Lewis Hamilton. The honorary chair is LeBron James.
One person who will not be at Ms. Wintour’s side is Sean Combs, the man known as Diddy, who perhaps did more than anyone to set the template for Black men as impresarios, running an empire that placed him at the intersection of music, fashion, liquor, and reality TV. Mr. Combs is currently detained in Brooklyn at the Metropolitan Detention Center and jury selection got underway on Monday in his trial on charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.
His influence on fashion and his connection to the Met Gala, however, is undeniable: Mr. Combs is the only person aside from Andre 3000 to be named on the back jacket of “Slaves to Fashion,” the 2009 critical theory tome by Monica L. Miller that inspired the exhibit.
Mr. Combs launched Sean John, his high-fashion meets streetwear clothing line, at Bloomingdale’s in 1998, more than a decade and a half before his fellow rapper Kanye West launched his Yeezy line. Many in the fashion industry were openly contemptuous of Mr. Combs’s foray into fashion, but Ms. Wintour was not among them. She selected him to perform at the 1999 Met Gala. He attended with his then girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.
In October of that same year, Vogue ran a fashion shoot shot by Annie Leibovitz, with Mr. Combs posing with the model Kate Moss as spectators at the couture shows. At the real shows, Ms. Wintour sat alongside Mr. Combs.
That December, Mr. Combs was involved in a shootout that left three people injured. He was ultimately acquitted of gun possession charges.
Few in the fashion world blinked.
For a New Yorker profile of Mr. Combs published in 2002, Ms. Wintour said, “Puffy is so wonderfully over the top and flamboyant, and, God, do we need that in our business. Fashion goes through severely dull periods and we must have relief. Puff provides it.”
In 2004, he became the first Black man to be named the top men’s wear designer of the year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (an organization in which Ms. Wintour is heavily involved).
Mr. Combs made his last appearance at the Met Gala two years ago, wearing an opulent black Sean Jean cape adorned with black roses. Vogue ran an article about his preparation for the event.
“I would say that my legacy is for all Black designers,” he said in another Vogue article, which published in 2019. “Diversity is essential, but Black designers have a hard time, and we’re the most fashionable people on planet earth. So [Sean John] gave birth to this moment; it empowered these young creatives to know that their talent and their ideas and their designs had value and that they had power. I see the trickle-down effect, and that was the intention, going with the goal of breaking down the doors for other people.”
