African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style

“AFRICAN-PRINT FASHION NOW! A STORY OF TASTE, GLOBALIZATION, AND STYLE”
curated by suzanne gott, with kristyne loughran, betsy d. quick, and leslie w. rabine

travel itinerary
fowler museum at ucla
march 26–july 30, 2017
memphis brooks museum of art
winter 2018
museum of arts and design
june 7–september 2, 2018

Developed by the Fowler Museum at UCLA, “African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style” introduces visitors to a dynamic and diverse African dress tradition and the increasingly interconnected fashion worlds that it inhabits: “popular” African-print styles created by local seamstresses and tailors across the continent; international runway fashions designed by Africa’s newest generation of couturiers; and boundary-breaking, transnational, and youth styles favored in Africa’s urban centers. All feature the colorful, boldly designed, manufactured cotton textiles that have come to be known as “African-print cloth.”

The exhibition explores the global stories of these textiles (Fig. 1)—the early history of the print cloth trade with West and Central Africa, the expansion of its production following independence movements, and the increasing popularity of Asian-made print cloths. Diverse popular styles from Ghana (Fig. 2), Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Senegal are featured, as well as groundbreaking runway fashions by some of Africa’s most talented couturiers—Ituen Basi, Gilles Touré (Fig. 3), Lanre da Silva Ajayi, Titi Ademola, Lisa Folawiyo, Dent de Man, Adama Paris, Patricia Waota, Ikiré Jones, and Afua Dabanka. Black-and-white photographic portraits display print fashions during the 1960s and 1970s, and works by contemporary photographers and artists incorporate African print to convey evocative messages about heritage, hybridity, displacement, and aspiration. Throughout the exhibition, African-print fashions are considered as creative responses to key historical moments and ever-changing stylistic preferences.

This is the first major museum exhibition to focus on fashions from the continent and diaspora that feature African-print cloth. It draws on the Fowler’s collections, private loans, and the remarkable archives of the Dutch company Vlisco. The extensive Vlisco holdings include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cloths produced in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and post-independence Africa, as well as exhaustive historical records. Given the Fowler’s stellar collections and its long and distinguished history of developing major international projects centering on textiles and other arts of Africa, this project fits squarely within the Museum’s programmatic priorities. It is curated by Suzanne Gott with Kristyne Loughran, Betsy D. Quick, and Leslie W. Rabine. “African-Print Fashion Now!” debuts at the Fowler Museum in spring 2017 and will travel to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2018.¹

A major publication accompanies the exhibition, with a foreword by John Picton, afterword by Victoria L. Rovine, and contributions by the editors and twelve additional scholars from Africa, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. With the goal of significantly enhancing existing scholarship on African textiles and fashion, the volume focuses exclusively on African-print fashion, its many dimensions and transformations. The authors bring original insights to the field by consciously and systematically mapping the diversity and exchanges among different African cultures. The first section focuses on the nineteenth-century origins and ongoing evolution of African-print textiles. It also highlights the transformation of Javanese batiks into a distinctive textile form shaped by West and Central Africa’s diverse and discerning consumers. The second section addresses popular and designer African-print fashions, their intersections, and changing contemporary styles. In the final section, essays explore new developments in African-print marketing, the role of the Internet, and the relationship between other forms of contemporary art and African-print fashion.

1.

A medley of African-print cloths features, clockwise from left: Electric Fans, wax print, Vlisco, the Netherlands; ABC on laptop, wax print, Vlisco, the Netherlands; Commemorative cloth for the state visit of President and Mrs. Obama to Ghana in 2009, fancy print, ATL, Ghana...