“Writing my latest book, Dream Count, made me think about clothes again,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote recently in an Elle.com feature. The sentence is quiet and personal, but it offers a useful lens on her appearance at the 2025 Met Gala. Adichie’s red carpet moment is being widely read as a fashion debut, but it is just as much a literary one. Her look and role on the Met Gala host committee points to a shift in how literary fame circulates, and who gets to represent it, within the wider circuits of global cultural power.

Adichie is not the first African writer to grace the Met Gala red carpet or, more broadly, the glamorous glare of popular and global media. In 2021, Tomi Adeyemi attended the Met Gala; in 2018, Nnedi Okorafor appeared at the Emmys alongside George R.R. Martin; and more recently, Bernardine Evaristo was spotted at the BAFTAs and Bolu Babalola at the Sinners movie European premier. These moments all speak to the expanding visibility of African writers across cultural domains. But something about Adichie’s appearance feels different, and that difference is what I want to explore in this essay.

She arrived at the Met Gala in a structured crimson gown by Nepalese American designer Prabal Gurung: feathered at the shoulders, cinched at the waist, and scattered with miniature bows and ties. The look interpreted the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” theme by playing with formal menswear codes while expressing something undeniably intimate. “An absolute delight of a day,” Adichie wrote in an Instagram caption. “Thank you, Prabal Gurung—I will always remember how I felt wearing this dress: fully myself, but the most glamorous version.”

This idea of fashion as self-recognition aligns with Adichie’s reflection in Elle, Adichie writes about fashion as an emotional practice that could turn an experience of loss into a context for reinvention. After her parents passed, she altered some of her favorite dresses in what she describes as a visceral response to grief. She began wearing her mother’s gold jewelry and designing custom T-shirts with Igbo inscriptions to mourn her father. “Clothes can offer an emotional release,” she writes, “when, even as a writer, words completely fail you.”

In an interview, Adichie recalls overcoming a chronic case of intense writer’s block and began writing Dream Count after her mother’s passing, and reflects on it as a moment that, in her words, “opened the door for me to get back into my creative space—to comfort me, maybe.” Fashion connected Adichie to her mother, and that emotional connection played a role in reactivating her creativity. When Adichie says clothes offer an emotional release when words fail, she’s describing an experience that presents the very conditions under which Dream Count was written. Therefore, clothing isn’t a distraction from writing or a separate performance of self, it’s part of the same expressive system. Adichie’s reflections on fashion consistently reveal this deeper entanglement: fashion, for her, is a way into writing.

In that sense, Adichie’s Met Gala stages the return of a writer whose visibility is linked to her writing. Over the past decade, Adichie has resisted the cultural scripts that narrow what it means to be a writer: appearing in a Beyoncé track, leading a skincare campaign, seating front row at Dior shows, covering magazines and now walking the Met Gala red carpet. This year’s Met Gala exhibition drew from Monica L. Miller’s Slaves to Fashion, a study of Black dandyism and sartorial self-fashioning in the Atlantic world. Miller shows how style has long served as a site of Black creative resistance and self-definition. Adichie, as a Nigerian woman novelist dressed by an Asian American designer, extends the framework into other geographies. If Miller’s dandy navigates the post-slavery Atlantic, Adichie stands at the intersection of global fashion circuits and African modernity.

Here, Harriet Hughes’s work on Nigerian fashion offers a fuller context. In her study of Lagos-based designers like Maki Oh and Orange Culture, Hughes argues that Nigerian fashion involves “translocal aesthetic labor”—the weaving of indigenous forms, colonial histories, and global fashion codes. While Adichie’s dress was not Nigerian-made, it resonates with what Hughes identifies as a Lagosian sensibility: expressive, mobile, self-aware. The use of feathers, red fabric, and ornamental detail in Adichie’s outfit echoes Nigerian celebratory fashion while remaining in conversation with global couture. It also sits alongside other African fashion traditions that Superfine sought to highlight—including the visual legacy of the Sapeurs, the Congolese style movement rooted in postcolonial rebellion and elegance.

Adichie’s appearance at the Met Gala draws from both the diasporic aesthetics Miller traces and the postcolonial Nigerian sensibility Hughes theorizes. Standing at the intersection of these traditions allows her to move between a literary and visual persona attentive to the aesthetic politics of both trans-Atlantic diasporic experience and African modernity—a theme that cuts across her last two novels, Americhanah and Dream Count.

I want to conclude by asking how this adds to our understanding of the changing forms of literary influence. Adichie served on the Met Gala Host Committee alongside figures like A$AP Rocky, Tyla, Edward Enninful, Simone Biles, Ayo Edebiri, Regina King, and many others, all public figures fluent in the language of spectacle. She was the only African novelist on the list. That distinction matters. Writers have historically stood apart from celebrity culture, their authority rooted in slowness, interiority, and the written word. Even in an era where authors are increasingly expected to appear beside their work, to be visible as well as read, Adichie negotiates that expectation differently. She is not a celebrity who writes, but a writer for whom visibility is part of the creative practice. In so doing, she navigates multiple systems of visibility. Her presence at the Met Gala, and at Burna Boy’s afterparty later that night, indexes a mode of literary presence attuned to image and how it mediates between affect and influence. This takes her across a hybrid zone where the African intellectual has cultural currency in multiple arenas.

This matters because few, if any, contemporary writers, African or Western, move with the kind of multidirectional cultural fluency that Adichie does. Unlike other high-profile literary figures like Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, and Ocean Vuong whose engagements with fashion or celebrity remain peripheral or ambivalent, Adichie treats visibility as part of her literary practice. She doesn’t reject the machinery of branding; she redirects it toward a form of authorship that makes space for image and self-styling as legitimate sites of narrative labor.

Somehow this is more than rebranding of the writer for the algorithmic age. It shows what literary authority can look like, fragmented, networked, and distributed across books, interviews, literary events, red carpets, and Instagram reels.

 

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This article has been edited for clarity.