The Global Circulation of African Fashion
The Global Circulation of African Fashion

Author: Leslie W. Rabine

Publisher:

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Transnational movements of people, cultural objects, images and identities have played a vital role in creating an informal global network for African fashion - from clothing designers and tailors to dyers and jewellery makers. This book traces the changing meanings, aesthetics and histories of the thriving informal African fashion network through its multicultural cross-roads of Los Angeles, Kenya and Senegal. In African communities, designers compete with each other to survive and often travel long distances in search of new markets. Such competition and bridging of cultures fuels creativity and innovation. From adapting western fashion magazines to combining 'ethnic' designs with dramatic new colours and techniques, artisans weave a variety of borrowed influences into their traditional practices. Rabine explores the interrelationship and tensions that exist between these popular and mass cultures, including the ways that global circulation threatens to destroy artisanal skills. With its unique insights into the operation and ethics of these global networks, this book offers a timely contribution to contemporary studies of fashion, transnationalism and globalization.

African Fashion, Global Style
African Fashion, Global Style

Author: Victoria L. Rovine

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-01-12

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0253014131

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African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

Creating African Fashion Histories
Creating African Fashion Histories

Author: JoAnn McGregor

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0253060133

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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: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured 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.

Creating African Fashion Histories
Creating African Fashion Histories

Author: JoAnn McGregor

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0253060141

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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: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured 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.

The Art of African Fashion
The Art of African Fashion

Author: Els van der Plas

Publisher: Africa Research and Publications

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13:

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Illustrated throughout with sumptuous colour and black & white photographs, this book covers contemporary African fashion in its widest sense taking in clothing, textile, and hair design, body decoration, and the work of models.

Fashioning the Afropolis
Fashioning the Afropolis

Author: Kerstin Pinther

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-07-14

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1350179531

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With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas. To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa's rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.

Rethinking Fashion Globalization
Rethinking Fashion Globalization

Author: Sarah Cheang

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1350181307

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Rethinking Fashion Globalization is a timely call to rewrite the fashion system and push back against Eurocentric dominance within fashion histories by presenting new models, approaches and understandings of fashion from critical thinkers at the forefront of decolonial fashion discourse. This edited collection draws together original, diverse, and richly reflective critiques of the fashion system from both established and emerging fashion scholars, researchers and creative practitioners. Chapters straddle current calls for decolonization and inclusion, as well as reflections on de-westernization, post-colonialism, sustainability, transnationalism, national identities, social activism, global fashion narratives, diversity, and more. The volume is divided into three key themes, 'Disruptions in Time and Space', 'Nationalism and Transnationalism' and 'Global Design Practices'. These themes re-map fashion's origins, practices and futures, to present alternatives for reclaiming and rethinking fashion globalization in the 21st century.

Clothing Poverty
Clothing Poverty

Author: Andrew Brooks

Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.

Published: 2015-02-12

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1783600691

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‘An interesting and important account.’ Daily Telegraph Have you ever stopped and wondered where your jeans came from? Who made them and where? Ever wondered where they end up after you donate them for recycling? Following a pair of jeans, Clothing Poverty takes the reader on a vivid around-the-world tour to reveal how clothes are manufactured and retailed, bringing to light how fast fashion and clothing recycling are interconnected. Andrew Brooks shows how recycled clothes are traded across continents, uncovers how retailers and international charities are embroiled in commodity chains which perpetuate poverty, and exposes the hidden trade networks which transect the globe. Stitching together rich narratives, from Mozambican markets, Nigerian smugglers and Chinese factories to London’s vintage clothing scene, TOMS shoes and Vivienne Westwood’s ethical fashion lines, Brooks uncovers the many hidden sides of fashion.

Fashioning Africa
Fashioning Africa

Author: Jean Allman

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2004-09-09

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780253111043

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Everywhere in the world there is a close connection between the clothes we wear and our political expression. To date, few scholars have explored what clothing means in 20th-century Africa and the diaspora. In Fashioning Africa, an international group of anthropologists, historians, and art historians bring rich and diverse perspectives to this fascinating topic. From clothing as an expression of freedom in early colonial Zanzibar to Somali women's headcovering in inner-city Minneapolis, these essays explore the power of dress in African and pan-African settings. Nationalist and diasporic identities, as well as their histories and politics, are examined at the level of what is put on the body every day. Readers interested in fashion history, material and expressive cultures, understandings of nation-state styles, and expressions of a distinctive African modernity will be engaged by this interdisciplinary and broadly appealing volume. Contributors are Heather Marie Akou, Jean Allman, A. Boatema Boateng, Judith Byfield, Laura Fair, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Margaret Jean Hay, Andrew M. Ivaska, Phyllis M. Martin, Marissa Moorman, Elisha P. Renne, and Victoria L. Rovine.

The Chinese Fashion Industry
The Chinese Fashion Industry

Author: Jianhua Zhao

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1847889387

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Less than three decades ago, when the Chinese bought cloth or clothes, they would have had to use a government-issued coupon. Today the Chinese fashion industry is one of the most dynamic in the world - it not only supplies fashions to the increasingly discerning domestic market, but also provides one-third of the clothing sold in the global market. How did this phenomenal transition come about? What can the growth of the Chinese fashion industry tell us about the post-Mao China? What roles do the local and the global play in the dramatic changes? This book offers a historically informed, ethnographically grounded and interpretive analysis of contemporary Chinese fashion and the fashion industry. It examines the interplay of state politics, market forces, local social and cultural factors, and the global political economy, both in the rise of the Chinese fashion industry and in the life and work of Chinese fashion professionals. As the first ethnographic account of the Chinese fashion industry in the post-Mao era, The Chinese Fashion Industry combines first-hand accounts with sophisticated cultural analysis to offer new insights, and will be of interest to students and scholars of fashion, anthropology and China.