Iké Udé will tell you that he is not a dandy, and that he wonders why Americans are so keen to categorize people. “I don’t think I should elect to call myself anything,” he said.
If pressed, though, the elegant Mr. Udé, a New York artist born in Nigeria, will acknowledge that “dandyism is a discipline,” one that he does practice, even while refusing any label.
Yet dandyism is all about refusal — of fixed identities, of mediocrity, of gender conventions, of the boundary between life and art. Dandyism blends literary and artistic creation with the art of personality, the careful cultivation of image and behavior — all of which applies to Mr. Udé’s practice.
Mr. Udé, 60, has long enjoyed a reputation as a pre-eminent dandyist artist; in fact, his portrait appears on the cover of “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” the landmark 2009 study by Monica L. Miller, a professor of Africana studies at Barnard College.
This season, Black dandyism — and Mr. Udé — are very much in the conversation. Andrew Bolton, curator in charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, invited Professor Miller to help organize this spring’s exhibition, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” which was inspired by her book.
Mr. Udé served as a special consultant to the exhibition, a work of his appears in the show, and he also provided the catalog’s epilogue, written partly in dandyist aphorisms. He was also tapped to photograph a related cover story for Vogue’s May issue, a profile of the actor and producer Colman Domingo, who is a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala.