There are fashion coffee table books, and then there are books that may land on coffee tables, but certainly serve up much more than compelling imagery from a designer\u2019s collections.<\/p>\n
With \u201cAfrica Fashion,\u201d originally put out by V&A Publishing and released in North America courtesy of Abrams on Aug. 9, it is minds that will be captivated.<\/p>\n
Equal parts inspiration-inducing images and historical context, courtesy (largely) of Dr. Christine Checinska, editor and curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where the book\u2019s accompanying exhibit opened in early July (and runs through April 16, 2023), \u201cAfrica Fashion\u201d is designed for exploration and education.<\/p>\n
Lesson number one? Africa \u2014 and its fashion \u2014 is about abundance, not lack.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe contemporary African fashion scene is so influential, so innovative, so impactful, I really see the continent as a center of global fashion,\u201d Checinska told WWD. \u201cI want visitors and readers and people that engage, to have a glimpse of what I think is the magnificence of African people. I want people to get a glimpse of the many, many histories and cultures. I want people to come away hungry for more and I want to resist that confounding narrowing of Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Told with a nod to the continent\u2019s oral traditions, with prose that strays from academic to poetic, the book tells stories from across Africa of designers that emerged during the cultural renaissance that followed African countries\u2019 liberation from colonial rule, like Ghanaian designer Kofi Ansah. It folds in the politics that can\u2019t be separated from fashion, addressing once-enforced European dress codes countered broadly in moments such as when Ghana\u2019s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered his speech at the country\u2019s independence ceremony wearing traditional West African agbada, where before, he\u2019d been pictured in Savile Row-style suits. Along the way, it weaves in the glamour of textiles and adornments with snapshots pulled from throughout the 20th century through to contemporary times.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, \u2018Africa Fashion\u2019 tells a story of the richness of the African continent, its people, cultures and histories, through the lens of fashion. It is a story of unbounded creativity, abundance and modernity told from multiple Global Africa perspectives,\u201d Checinska writes in the book\u2019s intro. And as she tells WWD, it\u2019s \u201calmost a moment of colonizing in reverse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The title comes sans the \u201cn,\u201d as in Africa, not African, by design: \u201cThe title is \u2018Africa\u2019 rather than African because we want to keep that open-endedness. African fashion can look like many, many things. There are many ways to be African or many ways to be fashionable and so to keep that slight ambiguousness in the title, somehow there\u2019s space for all the tension, the contradiction, the beauty, the struggle, the hope.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to put down. [Africa Fashion is] everything from the rhythm of color to the kente cloth to the tilt of the hat or to the signet ring or to that gesture. It\u2019s all of those things\u2026that spirit within that understands the power of dress,\u201d Checinska added. \u201cWhen we put ourselves together in the morning, we do this consciously. There\u2019s a kind of a putting ourselves back to together, there\u2019s a reminding that goes on. We remember who we actually are rather than who society tells us we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though defining Africa Fashion could be akin to oversimplifying what it means to be fly (\u201cyou know it when you see it,\u201d Checinska said), Africa Fashion, as American-British playwright and novelist Bonnie Greer endeavors to lyrically articulate it in the book\u2019s prologue, can be put into some words.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfrica Fashion is always a kind of futurism. It takes you forward,\u201d she writes. \u201c\u2026The boldness of Africa Fashion is the complete act of will of it and the drive to creation. The insistence on this. This insistence is the release of Imagination from when it, too, was condemned to be fettered like the body. It is agency at its highest because it creates a future in which African people are not defined by anyone except ourselves. By. Ourselves. The power of reordering the world, of remaking history, can give the maker of fashion another way of seeing Africa. Now.\u201d<\/p>\n
As with the exhibit, the book\u2019s aim is to remake history, if remaking is adding truths to narratives omitted from fashion\u2019s canon \u2014 like of the richness of the continent\u2019s contribution to and influence on cloth and textiles.<\/p>\n
Indigo, for one, is most often associated with places like Japan and India, but Africa also has a long history of creating indigo-dyed cloth or \u00c0d\u00ecr\u1eb9, which has been made by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria since at least the 19th century, according to a chapter in the book written by Roslyn A. Walker, an American museum curator and expert in Nigerian art. The cloth, so named from the Yoruban word adi, which means \u2018to tie,\u2019 and re meaning dye, was once made exclusively by women using leaves of wild indigo plants.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the book and the exhibit, it is this idea of broadening people\u2019s understanding of the history of African textiles, the breadth, the depth, the width of it, the richness of it\u2026beyond Dutch wax prints,\u201d Checinska said.<\/p>\n
Bringing things forward to the contemporary, \u201cAfrica Fashion,\u201d in a mid-section of the book marked by brightly colored yellow pages, lets 22 leading designers on the continent \u2014 the same ones featured in the V&A exhibit, among them Imane Ayissi, Sarah Diouf, Lukhanyo Mdingi, Awa Meit\u00e9 and Sindiso Khumalo \u2014 tell their stories.<\/p>\n
Awa Meit\u00e9, a Malian designer who works with local artisans to weave high-fashion creations out of organic cotton and sustain jobs for the country\u2019s cotton industry (which is among the biggest in Africa), is on a mission to articulate Africa\u2019s \u201crich imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCreativity and fashion allow us to write our own narratives. They are spaces for people who have a vision for the continent and who want to show its strength and its immense humanity, its beauty, and its material and non-material resources. This gives full meaning to the emergence of African and Black creatives, inspiring present and future generations,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n
Cape Town, South Africa-based designer Sindiso Khumalo, a 2020 LVMH Prize finalist who also won the Green Carpet Fashion Awards\u2019 \u201cBest Independent Designer\u201d that year, is focused on honoring women, from their talents and contributions to their safety and livelihoods.<\/p>\n
\u201cInspired by the lineage of enduring and powerful Black women in history, our collections celebrate historical female figures such as South African activist Charlotte Maxeke, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Yoruban princess and god-daughter of Queen Victoria) and American abolitionist Harriet Tubman. I hope to amplify their voices through the storytelling in our collections,\u201d writes Khumalo, who employs young Black women who have previously been trafficked and exploited to learn things like the hand-embroidering and quilting the brand uses for its designs.<\/p>\n
For too long, the global fashion industry has overlooked Africa\u2019s contribution, and that\u2019s a wrong Checinska hopes the book will help right. And the cultural tide already seems to be rolling in that direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is an acceleration of interest and we can\u2019t ignore the impact of digital platforms and the digital world,\u201d she said. \u201cI also think that we can\u2019t underestimate the fact that we do have people of African heritage at the helm of magazines like Vogue, [with] Edward Enninful and his impact. You\u2019ve got Kenya Hunt [editor in chief] at Elle [UK] and her impact. We had Virgil Abloh, we have Ib Kamara [editor in chief of Dazed magazine].\u201d<\/p>\n
Before some of these changemakers emerged on the scene, what fashion had missed \u2014 and continues to miss \u2014 according to Checinska, is that what\u2019s coming out of Africa is haute, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome types of sophistication and the luxury element of African fashions is missing and I think the pan-African nature of the scene is missing. All too often it\u2019s maybe two or three countries that are focused upon, whereas there are exciting, creative, innovative designers across the board,\u201d she said. \u201cAfrican fashions can be and are, luxury.\u201d<\/p>\n
What\u2019s more, Checinska added of Africa and the diaspora, the products of the people, the exhibition and the book, is this singular and poignant point, a nod to something British artist and curator Lubaina Himid once said:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are us, not other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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