African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style

Abstract

Developed by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, “African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style” introduces visitors to a dynamic and diverse African dress tradition and the increasingly interconnected fashion worlds that it inhabits: “popular” African-print styles created by local seamstresses and tailors across the continent; international runway fashions designed by Africa's newest generation of couturiers; and boundary-breaking, transnational, and youth styles favored in Africa's urban centers. All feature the colorful, boldly designed, manufactured cotton textiles that have come to be known as “African-print cloth.”The exhibition explores the global stories of these textiles (Fig. 1)—the early history of the print cloth trade with West and Central Africa, the expansion of its production following independence movements, and the increasing popularity of Asianmade print cloths. Diverse popular styles from Ghana (Fig. 2), Nigeria, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Senegal are featured, as well as groundbreaking runway fashions by some of Africa's most talented couturiers—Ituen Basi, Gilles Touré (Fig. 3), Lanre da Silva Ajayi, Titi Ademola, Lisa Folawiyo, Dent de Man, Adama Paris, Patricia Waota, Ikiré Jones, and Afua Dabanka. Black-and-white photographic portraits display print fashions during the 1960s and 1970s, and works by contemporary photographers and artists incorporate African print to convey evocative messages about heritage, hybridity, displacement, and aspiration. Throughout the exhibition, African-print fashions are considered as creative responses to key historical moments and ever-changing stylistic preferences.This is the first major museum exhibition to focus on fashions from the continent and diaspora that feature African-print cloth. It draws on the Fowler's collections, private loans, and the remarkable archives of the Dutch company Vlisco. The extensive Vlisco holdings include nineteenth- and early twentieth-centu ry cloths produced in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and post-independence Africa, as well as exhaustive historical records. Given the Fowler's stellar collections and its long and distinguished history of developing major international projects centering on textiles and other arts of Africa, this project fits squarely within the Museum's programmatic priorities. It is curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine. “African-Print Fashion Now!” debuts at the Fowler Museum in spring 2017 and will travel to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2018.1A major publication accompanies the exhibition, with a foreword by John Picton, afterword by Victoria L. Rovine, and contributions by the editors and twelve additional scholars from Africa, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. With the goal of significantly enhancing existing scholarship on African textiles and fashion, the volume focuses exclusively on African-print fashion, its many dimensions and transformations. The authors bring original insights to the field by consciously and systematically mapping the diversity and exchanges among different African cultures. The first section focuses on the nineteenth-century origins and ongoing evolution of African-print textiles. It also highlights the transformation of Javanese batiks into a distinctive textile form shaped by West and Central Africa's diverse and discerning consumers. The second section addresses popular and designer African-print fashions, their intersections, and changing contemporary styles. In the final section, essays explore new developments in African-print marketing, the role of the Internet, and the relationship between other forms of contemporary art and African-print fashion.African prints are a special category of manufactured cotton textiles. Their origins are traceable to the painted and block-printed cottons produced in India for the Indian Ocean trade as early as the late fourth century CE. By the eleventh century, these prints had inspired the development of handcrafted wax-resist batiks in Java. These in turn caught the eye of Dutch manufacturers who produced early nineteenth-century imitations, ultimately leading to the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European development of so-called African prints for the West and Central African markets (Fig. 4).2 This development, as John Picton has insightfully observed, was “contingent upon a local agency with a far greater determining role than has hitherto been realized. … An African patronage [that] determined almost from the very outset what it wanted to see in these cloths” (1995:25, 29).To succeed in Africa's lucrative but competitive textile trade, European producers of African-print cloth had to satisfy the preferences and changing tastes of African consumers while at the same time accommodating cultural diversity within West and Central Africa. Early Dutch, British, and Swiss manufacturers relied upon a variety of resources to develop designs and color ways suited to different regional markets. In addition to drawing inspiration from Indonesian batiks and Indian calicoes, their designers copied local African textiles, depicted culturally meaningful objects and symbols, and produced prints commemorating historical events and political leaders. European textile companies also actively sought guidance from African cloth traders who used their cultural expertise and commercial acumen to assess and influence the popularity of new African-print designs (Nielsen 1979; Steiner 1985; Picton 1995).Decades of production specifically geared to local tastes and fashion trends had the effect of instilling a strong sense of ownership among African consumers. In fact, in some places, cloth was collected, and often saved, to such an extent that it became a significant repository of women's wealth. Africa's appropriation of print cloth as its own became especially evident during the mid-twentieth-century era of African independence, when local African-print ensemble styles gained new significance as expressions of national and Pan-African pride and identity (Beauchamp 1957; Picton 2001). Many newly independent West and Central African nations established their own African-print factories in partnership with established textile firms from Britain, Holland, Switzerland, Japan, China, and India (Fig. 5).3 Later, the West and Central African examples also served as inspiration for other nations seeking a form of national dress, such as Kenya and Zambia (Rabine 1997:149–51; Hansen 2000:82–83). In post-apartheid South Africa, West African print styles were among the new “visions of fashionableness” adopted to express an African identity and a connection to the continent as a whole (Klopper 2000:216–20).Since the late 1980s and 1990s, however, African-print manufacturers in Africa and Europe have struggled to survive in the face of increasing challenges. These include a significant reduction in the purchasing power of most African consumers as a result of IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and SAP trade liberalization policies that have left African-print companies unprotected from a new flood of inexpensive Asian imports (Fig. 6). The even greater affordability of African prints made in Asia that arrive at duty-free ports and are smuggled across neighboring borders has seriously undercut the market for established African and European producers (Sylvanus 2008, 2013a; Axelsson 2012; Prag 2013). Despite the controversy over these Asian imports, it should be noted that their accessible price has breathed new life into local African-print fashion systems.In assessing the place of African prints in African fashion, regional differences in value and significance have to be considered. In Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Togo, for example, African prints are at the center of local fashion systems (Gott 1994, 2009; Bickford 1995; Sylvanus 2013b). In other regions and countries, however, although African prints are worn, they are not the most sought-after textiles for fashion. In Senegal and Mali, hand-dyed cotton damask (basin) holds more value, while in Nigeria “African lace” (industrial embroidery produced for Africa) is more prestigious (Gardi 2000; Rabine 2002; Plankensteiner and Adediran 2010). In the twenty-first century, there are also expanding views as to what constitutes an “African print.” In Nigeria, for example, the new “African Inspired” Da Viva prints popular with West and Central African youth—which often feature smaller, uniform patterns unlike traditional African prints—may be classified as ankara, the same term used for African-print cloth.Following its introduction to West and Central African consumers, African-print cloth was initially adopted for use in regional styles. The most widespread of these combined local one- or two-piece wrappers with a European-inspired tailored blouse—a hybrid ensemble evident on the Gold Coast a century prior to the late nineteenth-century introduction of African-print cloth.4 In Ghana this ubiquitous style is known as kaba and slit, in Côte d'Ivoire as trois pagnes, in Senegal as pagne/marinière, and in Nigeria as iro and buba. In addition, two African-print dress styles developed: Cameroon's kaba ngondo and Sierra Leone's kaba sloht (see Gott 2005; Bickford 1995; Rabine 2002:29–33; Grabski 2009; and Wass and Broderick 1979).Within Africa's local, yet globally engaged, “popular” fashion systems, stylish dress is a feature of daily life and one of the most widely practiced expressive forms. To understand these local fashion systems, however, particularly in regard to African print, a radical shift is needed in thinking about how fashionable dress comes into being and what drives changing style trends. African-print fashion, in particular, is rarely purchased off-the-rack. Unlike many parts of the highly industrialized world where new styles are produced as ready-to-wear—conventionally developed through a complex and often lengthy chain of design, production, and distribution—the creation of African-print fashion in Africa is an ever-changing, grassroots phenomenon.New African-print styles are most often created locally in an interactive commissioning process between seamstresses and tailors and their fashion-conscious clientele (Gott 1994; Grabski 2009). Clients select and purchase cloth from market vendors or shops, and then commission a made-to-order style from a preferred seamstress or tailor. Styles reflect current trends, seamstress/tailor innovations, and the tastes of the wearer.In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, runway fashions by African designers have inspired local seamstresses and tailors to create their own versions of designer styles. The proliferation of African-print dress styles influenced by recent trends in global youth styles and international runway fashions represents the incorporation of a new “designer” approach in these popular fashion systems. This is reflected in the similarities between the African-print runway styles in fashion magazines highlighting collections by African designers and the African-print dress styles in the “fashion calendars” produced for local seamstresses and tailors in countries such as Ghana and Nigeria. These new hybrid forms attest to the interrelatedness of popular and runway fashion worlds across West and Central Africa.A fashion system is more than chic clothing, more even than well-dressed people displaying their sartorial know-how. In his authoritative book The Fashion System, Roland Barthes writes that it includes not only “real clothing” but also “symbolic clothing” and “imaginary clothing.” “Symbolic clothing” consists of written descriptions of dress; “imaginary clothing” consists of images—be they photographs, drawings, or paintings—of the clothed body (Barthes 1967:13–17). A mini-gallery in “African Print Fashion Now!” presents images by four portraitists from Africa's “golden age of black-and-white photography” (Wendl 2001:81). Although many viewers are familiar with Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibe, the gallery introduces four photographers from the same period who are equally of and the 1960s and 1970s, to (Fig. and in across Africa. by people in to their To for a people their new while a of … a from different from and and of different with the exchanges of African print to into their local of the fashionable one by from a chic of African life (Fig. The two tailored African-print over also the long with dress and and with John has a of African In creative of fashion and these the between fashion and so-called African designers from the as well as in the diverse and to the African-print sartorial and have international with their and Their fashions are by the between and Their also fashion that are on local and at the same time a determined with global trends and These in one they upon among and worlds to new and remarkable The designers and their works are of African in and fashion designers in Africa such as (Fig. Titi Ademola, and Gilles fashion that the and from such events they The are and In their their not only in the of being and fashionable but also to in the created the it is or designers to their from their as well as in in Many have also on and and their African designers who have established their of of Africa at a clientele a these African designers at and face many challenges. Basi, who was in for Fashion about the global of fashion designers while is very … have with the with the designers their and are and reflect their designs have through many of in to and trends. in and of shift from to and from and to It is their that particularly to the By prints in their collections, African fashion designers have a major role in these textiles at a different in the twenty-first Their African-print fashions the of print cloth as a of identity of to the a sense of and a for many designers and artists in “African Print Fashion Now!” explore the historical and cultural of African example, of African print in his consciously to African print as textile that use in Africa even not made in In the same however, that African print … the Africa of … this Africa the Africa of and that for the the of on history in to to have a African print comes to and his urban artists from it also comes to with the and his and have upon this of and African African print represents what about the influence of cultural diversity and on not use the cloth in his cloth from market in to the that his images of in (Fig. With remarkable at and African with and hybridity, of images of and of cloth in The and own dress by Lisa Folawiyo, a designer also in the exhibition (Fig. and use African print to a and into an The prints most a for the when the artists with contemporary forms of or the painted cloth with from and a inspired by print cloth also and This to his in to of and at the same time to his his with print cloth from his time in it a of of his dress in their own and fashions has to be fashion but to have fashion in of the some four or to as of a and a … of the and the made-to-order to images of fashionable “African-Print Fashion Now!” of fashion systems. It also to the consumers, and scholars global fashion. The of fashion Paris, and New York as the globally of fashion and African-print fashion these into a more mapping that includes such as and as well as African and where and runway fashion in of these often the fashion In to the fashion system of designers of African-print fashion to create dynamic in These designers are the more for even while or exhibition is into and presents some tailored fashions, one and contemporary photographs, a of runway and works by contemporary a history of African-print the fashion systems in local seamstresses and tailors and the of international African-print fashion as well as the of art and of contemporary African-print fashion the exhibition in the a “popular” style that is in a regions fashion an African fashion style for the international and a newly developed local style especially by African for the exhibition, a from d'Ivoire with a youth style from An of and by designer Lanre da Silva is an to the diversity that the first section, “African-Print Fashion with addresses the development of African-print textiles, initially inspired by Javanese and their into local A display of some cloths manufactured in Europe, Africa, and Asia presents museum visitors with the of and designs in markets and cloth This is by a of cloth production across these the early history of the and of African first as fashions (Fig. and then in tailored in historical and contemporary prints by the Dutch company Vlisco and historical prints from A and and the of Switzerland, while in prints produced in West and Central African factories following It also new to production and that as competitive in the face of the early of African in includes a of often in African-print that rarely their displaying and (Fig. an African the term and cloth from produced by more and The wax-resist with examples at in the and as well as historical use “African as a term to a textile with many regional or in Ghana, in Togo, and Côte d'Ivoire, in Senegal and Mali, in Nigeria, in and in The of Africa in while a print, its to other than Indonesian and Dutch or trade and the designs attest to the agency of African consumers and traders in changing fashions and preferences in African-print The of or cloths political life and moments of and the cloths one for special it as a of the In first and the independence were in a cloth his the new and the and (Fig. designed by the United Africa as a to the the cloth was then by Vlisco in 2010). This is one of two cloths in the Fowler Museum the second his for in a in the cloth as a of pride (Fig. to its value and historical and as an of political into section in the world of African-print fashion and the more black-and-white of In addition to this mini-gallery of mid-twentieth-century introduces to in the United States. a very different of the Senegal (Fig. the in print cloth made in These images where people where the through a with the of portraits from urban Ghana (Wendl their and their clothing, in often in a and two (Fig. that the cloths come as one be in one cloth. The of the textile patterns has been (Wendl in a of styles from African print wrappers with to that a from to In one particularly the a cloth commemorating the of in is the this cloth in a photographic in this gallery is the world of local, contemporary African-print fashion. as in the mid-twentieth-century and style from place to section Styles and Fashion will a remarkable diversity of print cloth styles from across the exhibition visitors be to that in West and Central Africa, first for and select their and then with a seamstress or to create Fashion in the of one urban popular fashion system and new in the creation of African-print fashion. styles from to are a on and as well as in “fashion calendars” the and African-print styles of four fashion are Victoria is a and sought-after seamstress who with changing fashion for on of the kaba and ensemble styles created for the exhibition (Fig. fashions are distinguished by of and is also in the Ghana and that works to the with new for and the of a national and fashions the new African-print styles of the The created for the exhibition feature that in with African-print In fashions, of the of Art in the of Art of of and with with to a Fashion Design that its fashion in section also presents some of the most popular and African-print styles from other the and of the trois of Côte the iro and of and the kaba ngondo of and by the Fowler these fashions in with African in the countries or in the local in fashion is the use of Asianmade of (Fig. and of style across Côte d'Ivoire, local styles attest to the dynamic of fashion a made-to-order style from a ensemble from a

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