Fashioning Modernity: Dressing the Body in Ethiopian Portraiture

Coronation image of Emperor Haile Selassie, pictured with Empress Menen Asfaw. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

From anthropological inquiries into dressing the body to historical narratives of fashion and psychoanalytic theories of the relationship between the ego and the image of the self, adorning the physical body has been the subject of a wide range of academic discourse. Existing research on fashioning the body or the image of the body, however, is limited to either fashion history in the West or anthropological investigations into the body-adorning practices of non-Western cultures. Consequently, the question of photographing the fashionable body, and the Western notion of fashion in photography, are rarely applied to non-Western cultures, and fashion is often considered by many fashion historians to be a specifically Western, specifically modern phenomenon that has firm roots in the Industrial Revolution.¹ However, at its most

Crown Princess Medferiashwork, c. 1943. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies. Photo: Haïgaz Boyadjian

basic, fashion is like any other system of communication. It functions as a visual expression of social and cultural as well as personal desires, whether through photographs or in person.²

In regard to Africa, photography and fashion have rarely been considered together, though it has long been established that the "fashion system" relies heavily on the visual image, particularly the photograph, for its distribution and perpetuation. The most relevant work has been through Seydou Keïta's and Malick Sidibé's images from Bamako, Mali, during the 1960s. Although the success of their photographs has been fundamental to expanding beyond the constraints of understanding photography in Africa as a colonial enterprise, the actual move toward deconstructing the image has been a rather limited one. Firmly situated within the euphoria of independence from colonialism in West Africa, Keïta's and Sidibé's images tend to be discussed in terms of the social and political conditions of the times, though a large part of their appeal lies in the fact that they depict a uniquely Malian fashion sensibility, both in photographic style and in the clothing worn. Therefore, the question of how fashion functions through photographs in Africa more generally remains unasked and unanswered.

In this article, I draw from Western and non-Western modes of fashioning the self in relation to the image of the body in order to specifically address the unique role of photographic portraiture in Ethiopia during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie (1930–1974). Portraits of the emperor and his family, printed daily in newspapers and magazines, were highly influential aspects of nationalism during the mid-1900s; however, these images affected not only the ways in which urban Ethiopians identified as such, but also how the rest of the world envisioned the legitimacy of Imperial Ethiopia.³

Early Photography and Portraiture in Ethiopia

Compared to the western coast of Africa, photographic technologies came to Ethiopia relatively late. Only months after the release of the daguerreo-type to the French public in November 1839, French daguerreotypists had brought their new technology to North Africa, the Middle East, and South America. By 1840 the photographic process had reached the shores of South Africa, as Europeans stopped at the Cape of Good Hope en route to India and Australia.⁴ In Ethiopia, the first photographer to visit was probably a British Protestant missionary, Henry Aaron Stern, in 1859, early in the reign of Emperor Téwodros II.⁵ There was limited photographic exploration of Ethiopia until 1879, when Emperor Menelik II invited a group of three Swiss craftsmen to help with the modernization of his country. Throughout the late nineteenth century, various Europeans visited Ethiopia, and following Menelik II's victory over the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896, the number of visitors as well as photographers increased significantly in Addis Ababa as Europeans dispatched numerous missions to the formidable emperor and his court.⁶

Emperor Menelik II. Courtesy Institute of Ethiopian Studies

Most of the photographs from...