Every May, the Met Gala arrives like a glittering meteorite, crashing into our feeds with a thousand designer trains and increasingly abstract dress codes. This year, however, the theme feels more grounded, more electric: "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style." It's a celebration of Black dandyism and its sweeping influence on fashion, identity, and resistance. And in that spirit, it feels only appropriate to take a step back – and a step sideways – to explore dandyism around the world. Because while Black dandies are taking a deserved and overdue center stage, the impulse to transform oneself into a walking work of art is a truly global phenomenon.
Dandyism has always been a strange little rebellion. In an age where style can mean anything – from an oversized hoodie to a double-breasted velvet blazer – the act of dressing up remains one of the most fascinating forms of self-expression. In a world where most people dress to blend in, the dandy dresses to stand out – not just to impress, but to perform. Across centuries and continents, the dandy has resurfaced again and again: part artist, part provocateur, part social critic.
But the Met Gala’s spotlight is also a chance to step back and look at the dandy more broadly – to ask why, even today, this figure survives and adapts, from Tokyo’s minimalists to Paris’s Left Bank dreamers, from Harlem’s zoot-suited dancers to Brazzaville’s Sapeurs, to one of the most distinctive and enduring of them all: Milan’s gagà.
Once you start tracing the lineage of the dandy, you realize: he is everywhere. From the salons of 19th-century London to the Sunday best of Harlem, from Tokyo’s backstreets to the cafes of Milan, the dandy endures. He is an international species, stubbornly overdressed, gloriously unbothered. Dandies exist anywhere human beings have decided that getting dressed is not simply a matter of covering flesh, but an act of rebellion, of poetry, of sheer delight. Because if the British dandy is subtle, the Congolese dandy defiant, and the Japanese dandy precise, the Milanese gagà is something else entirely: an unrepentant master of joyful, ornamental excess.
A Brief, Well-Dressed History of Dandyism
Before the dandy, there was the macaroni: 18th-century British aristocrats who returned from the Grand Tour with a taste for flamboyant Continental fashion — towering wigs, flashy silks, jeweled accessories. They were admired and mocked in equal measure, seen as symbols of foreign affectation and excess.
But the real turning point came with Beau Brummell, the man who redefined masculine elegance in early 19th-century England. Brummell rejected the macaroni’s ornamental excess and instead championed a quieter, sharper refinement: dark, impeccably tailored coats, crisp white linen, perfectly tied cravats, and an obsessive attention to grooming. His style emphasized restraint, precision, and control — transforming men’s fashion from peacock display to an art of subtle mastery.
Brummell’s dandyism mattered not just because it looked different, but because it meant something new. For the first time, style became a tool for self-creation, a way to assert identity and even social mobility. You didn’t need a title if you had the right cut of cloth, the right shine on your boots, the right air of effortless perfection.
Around the world, different versions of the dandy have emerged since. In the Congo, La Sape emerged: the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People, whose Sapeurs wore sharp European tailoring not as imitation but as joyful, self-styled reclamation. Japanese dandyism took on a detail-obsessed elegance: soft-shouldered blazers, narrow trousers, carefully chosen cufflinks, each piece treated like a line in a poem. In Harlem, the dandy manifested through zoot suits and jazz swagger, blending flamboyance with kinetic grace.
But Milan – Milan gave us the gagà.
Milan’s Gagà: Joyful Spectacle and the Art of Being Noticed
The word gagà entered Italian slang after World War I, originally borrowed from French, where it suggested a bit of a fool or an over-eager fop. But by the 1950s, in a Milan booming with postwar energy and cash, the gagà had become something more: the young Milanese man who elevated dressing into an art form.
This wasn’t the chilly, aristocratic minimalism of Brummell, nor the defiant elegance of the Sapeurs. The gagà specialized in playful spectacle. He was a man of bella figura – the Italian idea that looking good is both a moral obligation and a social strategy – but turned up to maximum volume.
The classic gagà uniform: an exquisitely tailored suit, yes, but with some personal signature that tipped it toward theatricality. A pop of color, a dramatically folded pocket square, a pair of shoes so polished they reflected the Duomo’s spires. And always, the accessory that symbolized his aesthetic philosophy: the pocket watch. Not for its utility (time could be guessed from the church bells), but for its symbolism — a small, precise flourish that marked him as a man who curated every detail.
But the gagà wasn’t merely about showing off. He embodied a specific Milanese ethos, particularly in the postwar era: optimism, social mobility, ambition wrapped in charm. He wasn’t born into the aristocracy: he was making himself — and making sure you noticed.
The Neo-Dandy: Remixing Tradition in the Age of Streetwear
Dandyism hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply learned to move differently. These days, it rarely arrives in a three-piece suit or a silver-tipped cane – at least not unironically. Instead, it appears in men who treat style as an ongoing project: mixing vintage tailoring with casual staples, caring deeply about proportion and detail, blending formality with humor. The modern dandy doesn’t dress to recreate the past. He dresses to assemble a worldview.
In the age of streetwear and algorithm-driven trends, the dandy curates. He borrows, reinterprets, plays – but always with precision. His clothes aren’t random; they’re constructed. He understands that dressing is a kind of authorship: not about chasing fashion, but about shaping how the world meets you.
The gagà has evolved too. Today’s Milanese peacock may take selfies more often than he polishes a pocket watch, but his instinct remains unmistakable. His style is still built on spectacle, on making sure that a little extra charm, a little extra polish, a little extra absurdity turn the sidewalk into a kind of stage. His suits are slimmer now, his colors bolder, his details a touch more ironic – but at the core, the ethos is intact: to turn appearance into performance, optimism into expression, and self-presentation into art.
The pocket watch that once swung from his waistcoat now sits on his wrist – often exaggerated in size, deliberately eye-catching, more flourish than function. Here, brands like Gagà Milano capture something more than mere accessory design: they embody the playful, exuberant spirit that has always defined the gagà. Gagà Milano doesn’t invent the modern dandy – but it does offer him a fitting emblem. Where once the pocket watch dangled as a mark of ornament, now the bold wristwatch inspired by that classic symbol of dandyism gleams as a knowing, stylish nod to tradition. These are watches not meant to blend in but to punctuate, to gesture to a lineage where timekeeping is less about practicality and more about personality.
You’ll find the modern gagà at Pitti Uomo, at an aperitivo bar, or gliding through Brera, dressed just a little louder than the moment demands, knowing exactly how much attention it gathers. He doesn’t pretend not to care: he cares very much. But he’s perfected the art of making that care look effortless.
What gagaism – and dandyism more broadly – still offers today is a kind of joyful refusal: a refusal to flatten into sameness, to downplay taste, or to believe that style must be subdued to be considered serious. It holds onto the idea that self-presentation remains a powerful form of creativity, charm, and sometimes even resistance.
The Met Gala’s celebration of Black dandyism reminds us that this tradition isn’t fading. It’s being reimagined. And the gagà, in all his updated extravagance, remains part of that conversation — just as committed to the spectacle, just as happy to steal the scene, and just as likely to be doing it in a suit he spent a little too long getting just right.
