Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike |
Over a hundred people
attended the Creating African Fashion Histories conference at a Brighton Museum & Art Gallery venue on 4 November where fourteen speakers summarised their
recent work on particular periods and places in African fashion with a strong
accent on the contemporary. For example, Jody Benjamin from the University of
California talked about 18th and 19th century cloth trades
and costume trends from surviving prints and a few rare pieces, Christopher Richards
of Brooklyn College focused on 1960s Ghana, and Juliet Gilbert from the
University of Birmingham gave us the insights from her recent PhD on young
seamstresses producing clothes for ‘the classy girl’ in Kalabar, Nigeria. Erica de Greef has worked in the field of fashion for many years in South Africa and
has recently been examining de-colonisation possibilities in the combined South
African fashion collections of the Cape Town museums now grouped together as
IZIKO. She investigated men’s button decorated trousers as a particular
example. Angela Jansen, a visiting researcher at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, has combed Paris, and Casablanca for sources on 20th century
Moroccan fashion history and shared her online findings of fabulous photographs
from the 1970s post the more traditional work by Jean Besancenot. The final
panel included the transformative fashion entrepreneur Avis Charles, a key
organiser of African Fashion International in Johannesburg, the journalist
Helen Jennings, and Moroccan scene experts Yoseph Ouechen and Mouna Belgrini.
Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike |
The day ended with an
opportunity to view the Fashion Cities Africa exhibition which celebrates the
current scene with contributions from designers from four cities: Nairobi, Casablanca,
Lagos and Johannesburg. This exhibition
is on until 8 January 2017. The designers from each city are introduced by a
fashion expert ‘curator’, and information on the city and the fashion scene is
provided on four sided pillars and by short films. There is also a handling
corner with long swathes of fabric to touch and other interactives. The range
of styles was impressive and mesmerising. The exhibition booklet is also photo
rich and info-snappy, and intended to have a wider circulation than the
exhibition itself which is likely to go on to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.
Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph by James Pike |
The international fares
for many of the speakers were supported by the Sussex Africa Centre at the
University of Sussex and the University of Brighton, both of which are key
partners in the project. Moving on from the V&A’s Black Style exhibition
co-curated by Carol Tulloch in 2004, Africa Remix at the South Bank Centre in
2005, and the ‘We Face Forward’ African art and music season in Manchester in
2012, this exhibition covers modern African fashion in a lot more detail and
the structure of co-curation is broader and more reflective of the industry it
portrays. Several UK museums have small collections of post-independence
African fashion amongst their holdings but this exhibition and the conference
(which will result in a publication) is a stunning new bench mark.
It’s whetted my appetite
for seeing South Africa – Art of a Nation at the British Museum, on until 26
February 2017
4 November 2016
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