Africa comes into fashion
* Photo: Models holding hands, Lagos, Nigeria, 2019 by Stephen Tayo. Courtesy Lagos Fashion Week
Daniel Nelson
A second explosion of African colour and creativity is lighting up London, as Africa Fashion at the V&A museum joins In The Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery.
The art show is indeed the more fantastic of the two as diaspora imaginations run riot, but fashion makes the point that, in the words of Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, “Clothing is to the African what monuments are to the European”.
The exhibition mentions bogalanfini, a Malian cotton fabric dyed with fermented mud that dates back at least 800 years, but its focus is modern Africa since the regaining of independence in the 1950s and ‘60s, after which “the continent was alight with creativity”.
It spotlights some of the pioneers, such as Alpadi, “The Magician in the Desert”, born in Timbuktu, learned the basics of the trade in an apprenticeship, studied in Paris and opened boutiques in many countries. Another was “Nigeria’s first fashion designer”, Shade Thomas Fahn, who was inspired by what she saw in London’s Edgware Road. She returned home and started staging shows using unpaid models.
The exploits of these early innovators are supplemented by snatches of social history, including the emergence of Africa’s first lifestyle magazine, Drum; the functions and popularity of drop-in photo studios that documented changing societies and were “places where dreams come true”; and a gallery of family photographs submitted to the museum in response to a public appeal.
There’s an interesting footnote to the arrival of colour photography: photographic film provider Kodak (in pre-digital days) published a “Shirley Card”, a picture of a brown-haired, white woman as a measure against which to calibrate colours and which set an international “white-skinned” standard for Kodak products. The exhibition fails to make the point that exactly the same racist assumptions and stereotypes have been — and are still being — made in contemporary times in face and voice recognition and job suitability programmes.
The second, upstairs part of the exhibition opens up dramatically, in terms both of physical space and exhibits. Rows of mannequins dressed by top African designers display colours, materials, styles, accessories, mindsets and, above all, a fertile willingness to mix these ingredients, though, surprisingly, most are variations on a Western style of clothing.
The link with the work featured by In The Black Fantastic — and the concept of Afrofuturism — is made explicit by the wording of one exhibit “echoing African fashion’s emphasis on a ‘better’ world for Black people”.
The upstairs section is a display, whereas downstairs it’s more didactically museum-like. The high-ceiling setting gives the mannequins room to live and breathe, and, for me, best of all are the huge moving images, high on the walls surrounding visitors, of African faces and figures moving naturally, gracefully, happily: wonderful, and way, way more joyful and expressive than the jaded, stilted, artificial hand-on-hip, exaggerated strut of the traditional catwalk model.
* Africa Fashion is at the V&A museum, £16 (conc available), Cromwell Road, SW7, until 16 April 2023. Info: 7942 2000/ hello@vam.ac.uk/ https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/africa-fashion
Events include:
+ 15 July, Fashioning African Literatures, 7pm, £12-£15
+ 15 July, Teacher Twilight - In Person, £10
+ 26 August, Friday Forum: Africa Fashion, £10
+ 22 September, Teacher Twilight Online, Africa Fashion, £5
+ 18-19 November, Africa Fashion Conference