When audiences walk into “Hat Matter: Thoughts of a Black Mad Hatter,” the set pieces they see aren’t just set pieces. The bespoke three-piece suits hanging on racks, the bundles of scarves and ties and pocket squares, the rakishly placed hats, the shoes that fade from aquamarine to navy are all the actual day-to-day wardrobe of writer and performer Michael Wayne Turner III.

Yes, the 30-year-old Oakland theater artist, poet and stylist really dresses this way all the time, seven days a week. (Shoes? “The foundation of the outfit,” he says.) He only recently bought a pair of blue jeans, but even those he wears with a blazer — and only on extremely casual days.

Turner identifies as a dandy, a term many might use pejoratively or wrongly assume to be the exclusive province of white people. But for him, as he explores in his one-man show — a compilation of poems, monologues and stories playing at Oakland Theater Project from Friday, May 13, through May 22 —Black dandyismis an attitude, an identity and a way to be free.

Turner first got interested in fashion as a child as part of dressing to go to his Houston church, where looking one’s best was a big part of the culture.

“就穿ing the same old white shirt, black pants, black tie would kill me, would suffocate me,” he recalled during a breakin a recent rehearsal. His family went to church most days of the week. “Getting dressed for church was my first rebellion and access to joy, like, ‘If I got to do this, I’m going to do it my way.’ ”

He started to play with color, maybe a red or purple tie with a yellow shirt, and to intersperse patterns such as paisleys and herringbones, paying attention to the tooling of fabric to create different texture combinations. By the time he was 10, his mother realized she could no longer shop for his clothes by herself; his taste was already too particular.

Turner embraced dandyism more fully after college, during a multiyear tour of Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s show “Word Becomes Flesh” — a time when he was consciously searching for an identity. Dandyism fit.

“I liked that it was whimsical, playful and yet serious, intellectual, cultured, sophisticated,” he said. “It allowed me to explore my manhood in ways that weren’t encouraged in other circles or with other identities. When you look like a cross between silly and serious, when you look like a cross between ugly and beautiful, in at least just how you throw the colors together, people allow you to be whatever you want to be.

“Young Black men are encouraged to dress in the costume of the criminal, the drug dealer, the gangbanger, the poor athlete aspiring to be rich and famous,” he added. “People approach those characters with a certain level of assumption.”

Turner was interested in exploding that assumption, or circumventing it altogether. He wants audiences — both passersby who notice his outfits and spectators to the solo show — to wonder about the mind behind the outfit.

That mind is what drew Oakland Theater Project Co-Artistic Director Michael Socrates Moran to mount the show. He describes Turner as “an all-around theater artist,” with Turner’s writing, acting, musicianship and fashion — and Moran doesn’t use the word “artist” lightly.

“It feels like awrestling with how to integrate the world through your medium, and his medium is multifaceted,” Moran said. Just the way Turner dresses, Moran added, “elevates a space.”

While for many the quintessential dandy is a dead white guy — Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde or Noël Coward — Black dandyism has a long, complicated history and a fruitful present. In “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity,” scholar Monica L. Miller dates the phenomenon to the slave trade.

“As the Atlantic began to connect blacks and whites in unprecedented ways, black people expressed their own sense of style in relation to that which they perceived was operating in the European societies with which they traded or in which they lived,” she writes.

Citing “Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style” byShantrelle P. Lewis, Turner sees Black dandyism as a rebellion twice over: against “who society has sold you to be and who your own race and community expects you to be.”

比喻自己看美国黑人的风格n men from the early 1900s. He’s so inspired by the Harlem Renaissance that he uses his wardrobe as an homage to that generation’s parents.

“If Langston (Hughes) was that dope, who is his moms? What was his pops like?” he said.

Turner settled in Oakland after the “Word Becomes Flesh” tour, honing his craft as a theater artist with Youth Speaks, the Living Word Project, Campo Santo and African-American Shakespeare Company and building his wardrobe. (He stopped counting after he accumulated 45 suits. At one point, he had 32 hats.)

He’s worked as a suit salesman, developing a discernment for different kinds of wools, eventually branching out into styling advertisements and photo shoots. Now, he’s the creative director for Oakland custom shoe brand Koffi Noir, working on the side as a personal shopper for individual “choice clients.”

Turner has a few style rules: Limit an outfit to three colors. Black goes with everything. Fit to size. “Keep your hygiene on point.” Once you’ve adhered to those precepts, “that lapel pin or that choice of scarf or the way you wear your hair, as continuers of your story and your personality, can be game changing in your personal style.”

When he tries on an outfit that follows all these guidelines, “I feel like a superhero,” he said. Turner estimates he routinely gets 10 to 12 compliments per day. Others are put off by his style, maybe thinking he’s a rich jerk or a sellout. That’s when the suit as superhero costume doubles as armor.

“I understand that you might not have been encouraged to live how you really want to live,” he said of those who throw him side-eye. “You might not be encouraged to dress how you really want to dress. So it is kind of jarring to see someone so the opposite of what you may be experiencing. Sometimes that’s insulting to your choices. Sometimes that’s insulting to your bravery.”

The mind-set of the dandy makes space for those who can’t conceive of the dandy. “The attitude of the dandy is this complete acceptance and recognition of a complex mind expressed in clothing.”

“Hat Matter: Thoughts of a Black Mad Hatter”:Written and performed by Michael Wayne Turner III. Friday, May 13, through May 22. $25-$75. Flax Art & Design, 1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Oakland.510-646-1126.https://oaklandtheaterproject.org