\u201cTHERE ARE MANY ways to be fashionable and African,\u201d says Christine Checinska, curator of the Portland Art Museum\u2019s latest exhibition, Africa Fashion. Such, she explains, is the reasoning for the distinction between African and Africa in the title: Africa as an adjective, grouping hundreds of distinct cultures from 54 countries, can only be a \u201cpsychological space,\u201d a distinction often cast upon the continent by the rest of the world, rather than any form of collective identity created within it. The fashion, she says, spans both personal and collective identity, as both a voice about \u201cone\u2019s place in the world,\u201d and \u201ca catalyst for social change.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show comes to town by way of London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Checinska is the senior curator of African and African diaspora textiles and fashion, and after a run at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Now, at PAM (through February 18), local touches include two works from Portland-based designer Komi Jean Pierre Nugloze, of N\u2019Kossi Boutique in the West End, and displays designed by the local architecture firm Lever.<\/p>\n
The exhibition presents a chronology of fashion beginning around 1960, the \u201cyear of Africa,\u201d in which 17 African nations were liberated from colonial occupation\u2014the nascent days of a collective, pan-African identity. This, Checinska explains, is by no means the beginning of Africa fashion, but it was when the professional African fashion industry began to take part in the international conversation, all the while eliding the white gaze driving global fashion\u2019s aesthetic.<\/p>\n
The opening section of the exhibit contextualizes the region\u2019s history: studies of ancestral fabrics\u2014delicately hand-woven kente cloth, iconic Malian b\u00f2g\u00f2lanfini or \u201cmud cloth\u201d\u2014present ancestral materials African designers had at their disposal. Issues of magazines from the late \u201950s and early \u201960s and novels\u2014James Ngugi\u2019s A Grain of Wheat, Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart\u2014set the social scene. The first Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957, is referenced as an exemplar of the power of dress, a case study in the potential for political signaling in clothes.<\/p>\n
Then comes the first wave of fashion designers that broke out from African countries onto the international scene: Shade Thomas-Fahm, who returned to her native Lagos, Nigeria, in 1960, after studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in London; Malian designer Chris Seydou, who constructed tailored garments from b\u00f2g\u00f2lanfini in the \u201990s in Paris, setting up his own atelier after studying with Parisian designers. Most garments are displayed on mannequins, though there is a moving room of photography, including a modern series shot by the fashion editor, photographer, and stylist Ibrahim Kamara featuring vintage Seydou garments.<\/p>\n
The historical preamble culminates in the present-day, celebrated in an expansive room with a quasi-catwalk of frozen mannequins on a meandering stage. The effect is staggering, like the curtain call of a sizable fashion show, if every outfit were from a different collection. What makes it truly overwhelming\u2014in the best sense\u2014is the question at the core of the exhibition: the notion of Africa versus African.<\/p>\n
The four dozen garments in this final hall have very little in common. Just as an entire continent cannot be logically classified, the works give a taste of the current state of fashion from 21 African countries, as well as its global diaspora. But in their incoherence, they further the exhibition\u2019s main point of abundance, that a psychic space is the only tie grouping the continent\u2019s fashion creatives.<\/p>\n
If there is an overarching theme to the modern designs, it\u2019s that of queer and gender norm\u2013subverting statements. Some are relatively subtle, like Nugloze\u2019s intricately beaded women\u2019s suit adorned with the vertical stripes of a prototypical men\u2019s power suit. Some are explicit, like Johannesburg designer Rich Mnisi\u2019s rainbow zebra\u2013print, transgender pride jacket and chaps. It\u2019s hard not to wonder if this panoramic snapshot of Africa fashion is aspirational in its celebration of queerness, or reflective of a scene\u2014though, by the laws of both anthropology and fashion itself, it is likely both.<\/p>\n
The fashion of today is undoubtedly queer, and global. Americans will spot versions of trends popular stateside\u2014couture crafted from sportswear fabrics, a billowy wide leg or sleeve, a reverence for ultra-saturated denim. But the designs shown here are clearly created from a distinct viewpoint: the collective psyche of Africa fashion is palpable amid the flurry. The novelist and playwright Bonnie Greer articulates the sentiment in a prose poem that serves as the exhibition book\u2019s prologue, writing that Africa fashion \u201c… is nothing one can lay one\u2019s greedy hands on. But something beyond that you can receive: beauty, elegance, joy, dignity, and behind it, spirit\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the gorgeous, traveling exhibit on at the Portland Art Museum, clothes both reflect and drive culture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":36452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36],"tags":[7,37,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-36455","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fashion","8":"category-lifestyle","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-fashion","11":"tag-lifestyle"},"yoast_head":"\n