Superfine is animated by the tension between honoring Black male style and an anxiety that the stylish Black body is a spectacle for white consumption. But it is equally inspired by the delicious irony that white patriarchy has ceded the pleasures of celebrating the male body to men of color. Post-Enlightenment, the price of maintaining that patriarchal power was the renunciation of flamboyance and magnificence; the fashions of powerful men must deny that they are fashions at all. For all the fascination with “quiet luxury,” “old-money style,” or “the preppy look” (the meaning of which is reportedly shifting for Generation Alpha kids) and the inscrutable subtleties of establishment elegance, the truth is that most of what rich men wear today reflects the lazy indifference of a cloistered elite. In other words, it’s kind of dull, at least until some outsiders get their hands on it (think loafers and khakis, polo shirts or oxford button-downs under navy blazers, rumpled linen in pastel colors). It’s not an accident that this American prepster look, the uniform of WASP wealth, was made cool by Black jazz musicians such as Miles Davis (take a look at the cover of his 1958 album Milestones). It was also captured by Japanese aesthetes in the classic 1965 photography book Take Ivy, which brought the look from the United States to Japan. The style was codified by a Jewish woman, Lisa Birnbach, author of The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), and refined to mass-market perfection by another Jew, Ralph Lifshitz, better known as Ralph Lauren. Superfine highlights the symbiosis between WASPy staple ensembles and Black panache with references to the well-dressed men of Morehouse College and hip-hop artists obsessed with Polo Ralph Lauren, such as André 3000, Lil Yachty, and Thirstin Howl the 3rd.
When understated men’s style emerged in the mid-1700s, it was both a modernist innovation and a type of puritanical self-abnegation—a denial of the pleasures of the diabolical flesh in service of the divine intellect. When Flügel called this the Great Masculine Renunciation, he meant to suggest a profound spiritual and psychological loss. He wrote that “men gave up their right [emphasis mine] to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women, and thereby making their own tailoring the most austere and ascetic of the arts.” Arguably, men have resented this renunciation ever since, and their ressentiment has taken many forms: for a few, the illicit pleasures of cross-dressing; for many more, the destructive obsessions of repressed desire. But those men who were denied masculine privilege were free—or at least freer—to indulge in the expressive sartorial privileges enjoyed by men of past eras. They had less to lose. Black style, as seen in Superfine, developed because Black men renounced the Great Masculine Renunciation and embraced their sensuality, indeed their essential humanity, the inextricable connection between mind and body.