Creating African Fashion Histories

Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices

JoAnn McGregor, Heather M. Akou, Nicola Stylianou, JoAnn McGregor, Heather M. Akou, Nicola Stylianou

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780253060136
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte africana

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history.

The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: Howcan researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of pastself-fashioning that areobscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice?

From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.

ONE

Introduction: Creating African Fashion Histories

Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices

JoAnn McGregor

IN RECENT YEARS, there has been a surge of interest in African fashion among scholars, the media, and businesses in and outside the continent. Indicative of this new visibility was the opening of the Brighton Museum’s Fashion Cities Africa in the autumn of 2016. This was the first ever exhibition dedicated to the work of contemporary African fashion designers in a UK museum. It showcased the work of creatives from cities at the four compass points of the continent: Casablanca, Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. For the exhibition’s curators, the focus on contemporary designers “seemed to offer a way out of the disciplinary and ethnocentric limitations set by our historic collections, which were largely amassed in a colonial context.”¹ African material “traditionally fell into the museum’s ethnographic (now, optimistically ‘world art’) collection. Unlike objects from certain parts of Asia, few African objects made it into the museum’s Fine Art or Decorative Art collections.”² At the time of the exhibition, there were no African textiles to be found in Brighton’s fashion and textiles collection. Situating the work of African designers in the context of the continent’s rapidly changing cities provided curators with “a useful new direction” and created an “exciting, dynamic backdrop,” not least because the cosmopolitanism and buzz of these cities had inspired the designers themselves.³ The prism of the city enabled the Brighton Museum to display “a wide diversity of fashion practices, from street-style to tailoring and couture”; moreover, curators felt it “got around” various difficulties of who constitutes “an ‘African’ designer”: “Anyone working within the fashion industry, in its broadest sense, in that specific city would count.”⁴

The exhibition thus not only rode on a wave of popular and academic interest in African fashion⁵ but the curators sought to use Fashion Cities Africa to confront the coloniality materialized by the historic holdings of museums. By exposing and seeking to repair racialized exclusions and the persistence of Eurocentric regimes of knowledge and representation, the display addressed issues that are also at the heart of this volume. The exhibition deliberately crosscut conventional museum divisions that depict the world of fashion as specific to the West’s historical development, casting it, in Jennifer Craik’s terms, as a “marker of civilization,” while treating African clothing practices as “dress” or “costume”—that is, as static, traditional, and bound by social status and communal values.⁶ Its “newness” exposed the extent to which broader museum practice in the West continues to reproduce coloniality and its racialized epistemologies. This despite the intensifying pressure to “decolonize,” which has “made decolonization an ever-present part of museum debates and increasingly also museum action plans.”⁷ The initiative showed how African fashion practices are themselves a “political language” that can be “used both to constitute and to challenge power,” in Jean Allman’s words.⁸ By drawing attention to the chasm between the dynamic world of sartorial practice and the history of museum collecting from the continent, the exhibition was clearly “good to think.”⁹ But it was more than that, because it was also an attempt to transform practice, address the colonial past, repair its damage, and make the museum a more welcoming and inclusive space. It underlined both the urgent need for, and obstacles facing, efforts to bring about significant institutional change.

Creating African Fashion Histories is about the relationship between African sartorial practices and museums past and present. In the burgeoning new literature on contemporary African fashion, it is the first volume to focus on this intersection between fashion practices and museum work. This gives it a unique lens through which to explore the nexus between power, knowledge, and representation in both colonial and postcolonial contexts. Historicizing African self-fashioning in relationship to museum practice offers a new vantage point on collecting, institutional practices, classificatory systems, and modes of public display that have been closely enmeshed with colonial and postcolonial governmentalities. This relationship is particularly revealing, we argue, because of the stark disjuncture between the shifting currents of African fashion—as forms of embodied self-expression embedded in changing global markets on the one hand and the disembodiments, dislocations, and decontextualizations of museums’ conventional displays and the racialized frames that colonial collections materialize on the other. This book has been written in the context of renewed pressure for change in academia, museums, and fashion schools following Rhodes Must Fall, the Macron report on repatriation, and the challenges of such activist networks as Museums Detox in the United Kingdom, Museums Hue in the United States, and the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion.¹⁰ We do not aim to contribute directly to debates over what “decolonizing” means, but the chapters are informed by and speak to these discussions.¹¹

This volume arose as a product of a series of initiatives on African fashion on the part of the Brighton Museum, which included the exhibition Fashion Cities Africa in 2016, a conference on African fashion history, and a project to build a new collection of post-1960 African fashion, in which the museum devolved decisions on purchases to a community-based panel formed of local people with lived experience of African fashion alongside academics (in which two of the editors of this volume—Nicola Stylianou and JoAnn McGregor—participated alongside arts consultant Edith Ojo, curator of world art at Brighton Museum, Helen Mears, and others).¹² These initiatives followed criticism from local Black heritage groups, who had singled out the museum’s use of colonial-era African collections as particularly problematic and offensive. As Ojo, Mears, and Stylianou explain in the final chapter, these holdings were “perceived as a direct product of British imperialism: acquired under conditions of violence and evidence of the systemic subjugation of African peoples and their cultural practices.” The fact that these collections were mostly inaccessible, locked away in storerooms, was seen as a deliberate exclusion of Black people and was the cause of frustration and regret. As Divya Tolia-Kelly, Rachel Minott, and others make clear, museums are widely experienced by people of color as “unsafe spaces” that invoke a range of difficult emotions, from anxiety and pain to anger.¹³ Colonial collections—not only those that are loot—powerfully represent the failure to deal with colonial persistencies and racialized exclusion today. Researching, collecting, and curating African fashion histories, and doing so in a manner that was collaborative with African diaspora, offered a potential route forward for the Brighton Museum. The curators intended their various African fashion initiatives to address these criticisms and to work toward inclusivity and thus in the direction of decolonizing their own museum practice. The final chapter of this volume reflects critically on the extent to which the museum’s ambitions were achieved.

So why focus this volume solely on African fashion in relation to museum practice? Is it possible to research African fashion histories without perpetuating ideas of the continent as other? The idea of African fashion itself is problematic (as are any other regional qualifiers) given the deliberate innovations that define fashion and the premium it places on borrowings from across geographical and cultural boundaries. Moreover, top artists and designers from the continent define themselves in global terms rather than as African designers, as the chapters by Harriet Hughes and Beth Buggenhagen discuss. We argue that it is important to document histories of self-fashioning that have been denied in a manner that centers African agency and renders visible the depth and diversity of histories of style, situating practices within globalized interconnections. Rendering this history visible can help challenge stereotypes of the continent as “other” that continue to eliminate so much of the continent’s fashion history by deeming it inauthentic or un-African. It can reveal and disrupt colonial thinking manifest in the dress/fashion distinction. Essentialized stereotypes of African-ness and characterizations of the continent’s fashion histories as absent, shallow, exotic, disconnected, or derivative of the West stubbornly persist. They are upheld not only in museums and fashion schools in the West, but also within Africa, from South Africa to the Moroccan fashion schools and museums that M. Angela Jansen discusses in chapter 7.¹⁴

Figure 1.1. Fashion Cities Africa at Brighton Museum. Lagos. Photo: J. Pike.

By bringing together debates over museums and African fashion, Creating African Fashion Histories takes forward both fields of scholarship in a variety of ways. First, as the Brighton Museum’s initiatives and rationales suggest, curators have much to gain from a better understanding of and closer interaction with the dynamic world of African fashion. Writing on African fashion history, as we shall see, revolves centrally around global connections, modernity and hybridity, agency, self-expression, and embodiment. It demands attention to political, economic, and cultural contexts. The contrast with histories of museum collecting and display could not be more stark. Second, though perhaps less obvious, scholars of fashion and museum history can also gain from a better understanding of museums’ dress holdings. Research on African fashion and dress history is notably longer established and better institutionalized in the United States than in Europe.¹⁵ Yet it mostly neglects museum sources—often for good reasons—while the now substantial body of work on empire and museums has had little to say about historical collections of African dress/fashion specifically.¹⁶ But collections related to the dressed body, and African collections in particular, are potentially especially revealing.

This because the dressed human body is such a potent means of personal and political expression; items of dress occupy the boundary between public and private, individual and social worlds.¹⁷ Joanne Entwistle, a founding figure of dress history, describes dress as “situated bodily practices,” and as such, it is appear the very antithesis of conventio...