African Fashion, Global Style: Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You Can Wear by Victoria L. Rovine (review)

Victoria Rovine’s African Fashion, Global Style is an exciting and elegant publication which signals the arrival of a vital new subfield in African art history: fashion studies. Being the first book-length study on this subject, it will resituate and reenergize our discipline for years to come; not only it is about a subject so fundamentally connected into people’s daily lives and dreams but also the designers and brands presented here stand out as potent new icons of African art. They might even change how we see and what we see as contemporary African art.

Fashion matters—it really does. Rovine will bring into your classroom or living room the power of some superb African artists, their popular brands, and their sometimes eye-popping high-fashion creations. To highlight a very few, consider Amaka Osakwe, creator of Maki Oh, high priestess of the hyper-feminine, and the remarkable Hamidou Seydou Harira, both from Nigeria. From the striking and distinct aesthetics of Salah Barka from Tunisia and the uniquely complex constructions by Charlotte Mbatsogo from Cameroon to the unforgettable Ben Nonterah of Accra, Ghana, and Paris-based Lamina Kouate’s Xuly Bet—eh! Your classroom—perhaps even your wardrobe, your brain—will surely never be the same again.

The first chapter begins with the Ghana Boys in Africa, all together apropos considering that they were icons of mobility and modernity who introduced dramatic innovations into local embroidery traditions by incorporating figurative imagery—and that Bamako and Timbuktu were ancient centers of African cosmopolitanism. The second chapter is aptly titled “Nubia in Paris” for the immediate association it draws to the power of superficial exoticism. It returns us to the politics of textile history in the colonial period and stitches history and fashion forward by illustrating, among others, a signature work of Christine Dior Haute Couture designed by John Galliano, arresting in its precise African referents. In the following three chapters Rovine goes on to show how classically recognizable local textile forms, once themselves imported and adapted innovations, have been reinvented. In the fourth chapter, she explores “conceptual fashions” which involve more subtle evocations of Africa through techniques such as stitching, recycling, and reference. In the fifth and final chapter, she describes the history of particular brands in recent South African fashion industry—the Sun Goddess, MaXhosa, Darkie and Stone Cherrie. From the transformations that explain the isishweshwe textile traditions and the local history of the A-line, the Xhosa-inspired artistry of Themba and Vanya Mangaliso and Laduma Ngxokolo, to Nkhensani Manganyi Nkosi’s Sophiatown lively chic, the material delights.

Rovine delivers an insightful review of academic discussions of African modernities and how fashion can reorder time through liberational forms. The avant-garde creativity of Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater and their performance collaboration with Neliswe Xaba in Strangelove—the tragic historical drama of Sara Baartman (the “Hottentot Venus”) stands out—so much so that it takes things to a whole other level. Similarly, in her discussions of other conceptual works, such as the radically unconventional activist fashion of Parisbased Sakina Ms’a seeking reconnection with Africa and Lamina Kouyate’s striking subversive transformations with the Xuly Bet label, Rovine draws together signature theoretical debates about modernity and tradition while carefully and productively engaging previous scholarship.

In the last chapter, Rovine deftly explores the role that the media, magazines, and fashion shows play, concluding that Afro politans bypass the categories of “African” and “traditional” through the power of “contamination.” Yet here, where the book’s central theoretical proposition begins and ends with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s use of the term “contamination,” I feel that his formulation could have been more substantially qualified. The general contemporary usage of the word “contamination” refers to infection, that is, to a foreign substance or idea sullying or poisoning a condition of purity. When...