No one would ever call Sidney Poitier a dandy, but as the critic Elvis Mitchell once said to me, “He’s never gotten his due as a style icon. I don’t think anybody wore a suit better than Sidney Poitier. I have a friend who’s a men’s retailer and does his own design work. He has this jacket that he calls the Virgil. It’s modeled after Sidney Poitier’s jacket in In the Heat of the Night.” Black men know clothes. This year, the Met’s spring show at the Costume Institute is guest curated by Monica L. Miller, the author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009). The show begins in the 18th century and travels up to the present day. —Laura Jacobs