Contemporary African Fashion

4. Fashion, Not Weather: A Rural Primer of Style

In the rural area of Kabompo District in North-Western Province, Zambia, the catchword is “fashion, not weather.” I first heard this phrase when I commented on what I considered the unsuitability of a young woman’s dress who, in a stifling hot day, wore a lined, long-sleeved chitengi suit consisting of several layers. My friend rebuked me and admired the girl who obviously sacrificed her own comfort for her sense of style. She asked if I had heard of the common saying “fashion , not weather.” A commitment to wearing the latest styles, for many men and women in Kabompo, comes before comfort and even budget. Fashion in rural Zambia centers on a tension between farmers and imaginings of town life. I became acutely aware of this tension within my host family. The younger sister, Martha, a woman who had urban pretensions and lived in the nearby small town, gave her older sister, a farmer, several pieces of secondhand clothing. Since it is never appropriate to examine a gift in front of the giver, Maria took the clothing inside her house. She quickly returned and quietly gave the clothes back to her sister. Martha asked why Maria did not want them, and Maria, in a very matter-of-fact tone, stated that they were old, stained, and in bad E l i s a b e t h L . C a m e r o n Fashion, Not Weather A Rural Primer of Style Elisabeth L. Cameron 54 repair. The younger sister, obviously very disturbed by her older sister’s rejection, began to wail. Maria tried to quietly clarify why she was refusing the clothes by saying that her younger sister was assuming that, because Maria was a farmer, she would not know the difference between stylish, well-maintained clothing and rags. Rather than calming Martha down, she began to cry louder and sob that no one appreciated her. As the fight escalated, Maria pointed out that although she was a farmer and wore old tattered clothing in the field, she also visited town and needed nicer things for those trips. Maria concluded what was by now a tirade by informing her sister that she had friends who gave her new suits and not faded and torn secondhand clothing. Tensions in fashion and style between “innovative” urban and “conservative” rural communities is a story that is as old as the world. Urban areas of Zambia are innovative; but these new fashions take time to reach rural areas and be accepted there. Urban areas are a constant stream of new people, ideas, news, materials, and fashions. Easy availability of materials allows ideas to move quickly from vision to the street. In the press of people, wearing the latest style draws you out of the crowd, moves you from anonymous city dweller to the center of attention. The focus in urban areas tends to be on the youth, where progress and innovation are stressed. In contrast, rural areas move more slowly. New ideas, new fashions, and especially new materials are expensive and difficult to obtain. Ideas move slowly to execution. Few people are truly anonymous in rural areas. No matter what you wear, what singles you out is who you are, your past actions, and what members of your family have done. Control rests in the hands of the elder generation, who can demand action from their families. As a result, rural communities like Kabompo have strong ties to the past and are considered conservative. This essay looks at how this urban/rural split in Kabompo has manifested itself in the last century and examines the lengths to which young women and men in rural areas, who often have few resources, go to wear stylish clothing (Figure 4.1). The commitment can be financial, it can risk the relationships with elder members of the family and community, and it always ignores the weather. History of Fashion and the Rural/Urban Split Residents of Kabompo District, primarily a rural area except for several small towns and one government center, have a history of movement to and from urban Fashion, Not Weather 55 areas. The Upper Zambezi River area, because of limited mineral and agricultural resources, escaped the attention of colonial governments that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused their attention on the copper and gemstone-rich areas of what became known as the Copperbelt. Kabompo District became...