Ruth Carter & Jasmine Tookes Redefine Harlem Style at Met Gala 2025

Ruth Carter and Jasmine Tookes transformed the Upper East Side into “Harlem Nights” on the steps of the 2025 Met Gala on Monday in New York.

The Oscar-winning costume designer created a look that defined the evening’s dress code: Tailored for You — collaborating with the supermodel and taking inspiration from silhouettes and pageantry seen on the streets in 1930s Harlem.

“I saw it as an opportunity to channel the legacy of Black male elegance, what I call the entertainer in white,” Carter told WWD ahead of the big night. She looked to jazz legend Cab Calloway and the suiting seen on Eddie Murphy in the 1989 comedy “Harlem Nights” for interpreting some of the fashion themes that are celebrated in the Costume Institute’s spring show “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through Oct. 26.

“It’s tailoring that has long projected power and self-styled elegance, so I wanted to honor the lineage while reimagining it through the lens of a Black woman. Jasmine is the embodiment of suave sophistication, a super fine tailoring that nodded to the past but fully embodied the now.”

Tookes was the model in white on the red carpet — wearing a tuxedo, made of wool as a nod to male suiting, with a peplum silhouette, silk lapels and beads emblazoned on the shoulders. There’s a short shawl on the right of the shoulder and a long cape on the left side with silk charmeuse lining. It’s accessorized with a fedora and vintage carnation on the lapel. Worn without a shirt, the look adds a sensual twist to menswear inspiration. “I believe that this white tuxedo has a beautiful opportunity to shine as a picture of the past with its super fine tailoring honoring tailors,” Carter said. “She completely graces the carpet with her reimagining the male dandy in the feminine form.”

Carter said it took six weeks to craft, and it started with a meeting with Tookes to understand “her voice and her quiet elegance.”

“We explored the idea of ‘Harlem Nights’ and the idea of Cab Calloway in the white suit, but also the challenge was to say, ‘how do we take this theme and make it hers?’ Make it her own, and I understood that by the suggestions that she made, where we made choices on bugle beads or we took the black hat band that Eddie Murphy wore in ‘Harlem Nights,’ but we changed it to the white hat band. We thought of a black carnation, then we changed it to a white carnation, and it all began to make sense for her.”

In “Harlem Nights,” Murphy plays an affluent manager of a Harlem speakeasy that’s part nightclub, brothel and gambling joint in the late 1930s toward the end of the Harlem Renaissance era. It earned Joe I. Tompkins an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design.

Nearly 30 years later, Carter became the first Black person to win and be nominated in the same category for 2018’s “Black Panther,” and she won again in 2022 for its sequel “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

In the hit Marvel films, Carter explored Afrofuturism in her designs. With Tookes, she explores Black identity in fashion again.

“With this exhibition, I feel it celebrates the power of Black expression: whether it’s a preacher on Sunday, a dandy on 125th Street or on the Met Gala steps, style is language, and it shouts to the world that we are here, we are to be seen and we are to be celebrated.”