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Models at Lagos Fashion Week, 2019
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“There are many ways to be fashionable and African,” says Christine Checinska, curator of the Portland Art Museum’s latest exhibition, Africa Fashion. Such, she explains, is the reasoning for the distinction between African and Africa in the title: Africa as an adjective, grouping hundreds of distinct cultures from 54 countries, can only be a “psychological space,” a distinction often cast upon the continent by the rest of the world, rather than any form of collective identity created within it. The fashion, she says, spans both personal and collective identity, as both a voice about “one’s place in the world,” and “a catalyst for social change.”
The show comes to town by way of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, where Checinska is the senior curator of African and African diaspora textiles and fashion, and after a run at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Now, at PAM (through February 18), local touches include two works from Portland-based designer Komi Jean Pierre Nugloze, of N’Kossi Boutique in the West End, and displays designed by the local architecture firm Lever.
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A vintage Shade Thomas-Fahm design, circa 1970, Lagos, Nigeria
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The exhibition presents a chronology of fashion beginning around 1960, the “year of Africa,” in which 17 African nations were liberated from colonial occupation—the nascent days of a collective, pan-African identity. This, Checinska explains, is by no means the beginning of Africa fashion, but it was when the professional African fashion industry began to take part in the international conversation, all the while eliding the white gaze driving global fashion’s aesthetic.
The opening section of the exhibit contextualizes the region’s history: studies of ancestral fabrics—delicately hand-woven kente cloth, iconic Malian bògòlanfini or “mud cloth”—present ancestral materials African designers had at their disposal. Issues of magazines from the late ’50s and early ’60s and novels—James Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—set the social scene. The first Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957, is referenced as an exemplar of the power of dress, a case study in the potential for political signaling in clothes.
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A vintage Chris Seydou design employing Malian bògòlanfini or “mud cloth”
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Then comes the first wave of fashion designers that broke out from African countries onto the international scene: Shade Thomas-Fahm, who returned to her native Lagos, Nigeria, in 1960, after studying fashion at Central Saint Martins in London; Malian designer Chris Seydou, who constructed tailored garments from bògòlanfini in the ’90s in Paris, setting up his own atelier after studying with Parisian designers. Most garments are displayed on mannequins, though there is a moving room of photography, including a modern series shot by the fashion editor, photographer, and stylist Ibrahim Kamara featuring vintage Seydou garments.
The historical preamble culminates in the present-day, celebrated in an expansive room with a quasi-catwalk of frozen mannequins on a meandering stage. The effect is staggering, like the curtain call of a sizable fashion show, if every outfit were from a different collection. What makes it truly overwhelming—in the best sense—is the question at the core of the exhibition: the notion of Africa versus African.
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The exhibition culminates in an overwhelming hall of some four dozen outfits from present-day African and African diaspora designers.
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The four dozen garments in this final hall have very little in common. Just as an entire continent cannot be logically classified, the works give a taste of the current state of fashion from 21 African countries, as well as its global diaspora. But in their incoherence, they further the exhibition’s main point of abundance, that a psychic space is the only tie grouping the continent’s fashion creatives.
If there is an overarching theme to the modern designs, it’s that of queer and gender norm–subverting statements. Some are relatively subtle, like Nugloze’s intricately beaded women’s suit adorned with the vertical stripes of a prototypical men’s power suit. Some are explicit, like Johannesburg designer Rich Mnisi’s rainbow zebra–print, transgender pride jacket and chaps. It’s hard not to wonder if this panoramic snapshot of Africa fashion is aspirational in its celebration of queerness, or reflective of a scene—though, by the laws of both anthropology and fashion itself, it is likely both.
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Johannesburg designer Rich Mnisi’s rainbow zebra–print, transgender pride jacket and chaps, amid dozens of other designs.
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The fashion of today is undoubtedly queer, and global. Americans will spot versions of trends popular stateside—couture crafted from sportswear fabrics, a billowy wide leg or sleeve, a reverence for ultra-saturated denim. But the designs shown here are clearly created from a distinct viewpoint: the collective psyche of Africa fashion is palpable amid the flurry. The novelist and playwright Bonnie Greer articulates the sentiment in a prose poem that serves as the exhibition book’s prologue, writing that Africa fashion “… is nothing one can lay one’s greedy hands on. But something beyond that you can receive: beauty, elegance, joy, dignity, and behind it, spirit…”