Making Fashion in the City: A Case Study of Tailors and Designers in Dakar, Senegal

Abstract

This article examines the interface between fashion production and the visual experience associated with urban life in Dakar, Senegal. It focuses on tailors and fashion designers to explore how their relationship to the city informs their creative practices and the processes of making fashion. Both tailors and fashion designers locate their creative practice in Dakar by attributing their engagement with the city's visual and conceptual matrix as fundamental to fashion making. In addressing the interplay between fashion production and the urban environment, this discussion further considers the dynamics of artistic positioning and the complex intersections between local and global inflections. This analysis underscores the imbrication of fashion in Dakar and the city's conceptual and visual landscape, the street and the mass media, and finally dialogues within and beyond Africa. Not only do fashion makers select visual and conceptual elements from the urban ocular field. By creating new propositions for visual consumption, fashion makers also ever- constitute visual experience in Dakar.

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