The V&A Museum opens its first African fashion exhibition. Photographs, textiles, music and art showcase the creative power and global influence of the continent's designs.
Models holding hands in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2019, by Stephen TayoImage: Stephen Tayo/Courtesy Lagos Fashion Week | Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023
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With its first-ever exhibition on African fashion, London's Victoria and Albert Museum (known as the V&A), the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts, and design that was created 170 years ago, is attempting to address its colonial past.
The landmark exhibition "Africa Fashion" features objects, sketches, textiles, photographs and films from across the continent — exploring design from the African liberation years from the 1950s to the 1980s, as well up-and-coming contemporary designers.
The show aims to provide a "glimpse into the glamour and politics of the fashion scene," the project's curator, Elisabeth Murray, told press agency AFP. "We wanted to celebrate the amazing African fashion scene today. So the creativity of all the designers, stylists, photographers, and looking at the inspiration behind that".
Lead curator Christine Checinska calls the exhibition "part of the V&A's ongoing commitment to foreground work by African heritage creatives."
Founded in 1852, the V&A Museum's history is closely linked to colonialism, as some of its collections were established at the time, as Queen Victoria expanded its global empire — including in Africa.
The Asian collections, for example, include exhibits that date back to the India Museum established by the East India Company in 1801.
Many of the garments on display come from the personal archives of famous African designers from the mid-20th centuryImage: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023
African art and culture were long overlooked or misrepresented at the museum, says curator Checinska, who is a women's fashion designer and art historian. This, she says, is due to the historical division between art museums and ethnographic museums, "arising from our colonial roots and embedded racist assumptions."
"Africa Fashion" is paving new perspectives for the museum and is a testing ground "for new equitable ways of working together," she said.
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African fashion is political
The exhibition is divided into different sections — with names like "Afrotopia," "Cutting-Edge" and "Mixology." The sections deal with topics such as sustainability, gender, race, sexual identity or politics.
The first section, "African Cultural Renaissance," highlights protest posters and literature from the African independence movements. They are shown in the context of the fashion of the time.
Clothing in Africa always had a political aspect to it, as knew Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who proclaimed the country's independence in 1957, making it the first Black African colony to do so. He also symbolically traded European suits for traditional smocks made of the colorful Kente cloth.
Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence from Britain in 1957Image: Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Textiles play an important role in the exhibition. The Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui once said, "cloth is to the African what monuments are to Westerners".
African fabrics are unique
"The Vanguard," central attraction of the exhibition, showcases the works of pioneers of modern African design.
On display are designs by Alphadi from Niger, Shade Thomas-Fahm from Nigeria and Kofi Ansah from Ghana. They experimented with African textiles and styles such as beading, creating innovative designs with cross-cultural influences.
Thomas-Fahm's designs, for example, reinvented traditional African dress for the "cosmopolitan, working woman."
Nigerian designer Shade Thomas-Fahm (born 1933) is one of the pioneers of modern African fashionImage: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023
Another highlight of "Africa Fashion" is Moroccan designer Artsi's custom design inspired by a British trench coat and a Muslim hijab. The design is meant to raise questions about how to "present Africa in England," Artsi told AFP.
These are precisely the questions "Africa Fashion" aims to raise. It wants to stimulate a timely discourse on how Britain's colonial history should be dealt with in art.
"Africa Fashion" is on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London until April 16, 2023.
African fashion in film: Hollywood's Afrofuturism
From "Do the Right Thing" to "Black Panther," designer Ruth E. Carter has defined African fashion in Hollywood for over 40 years.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
How to dress an African superhero
Ruth Carter won her first Oscar for the elaborate costumes she designed with the help of 3D-technology for the groundbreaking 2018 blockbuster "Black Panther." The costumes now form the centerpiece of an exhibition entitled "Ruth E. Carter – Afrofuturism in Costume Design" at the SCAD Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
"Beautiful, positive, forward-looking, colorful"
These four words were pinned on the wall of Carter's studio as she painstakingly researched African fashion for inspiration while designing the costumes for "Black Panther." She explained about her work that she thinks that "people will now look at and appreciate African art differently. That is what we have done."
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
The brighter, the better
Carter has 40 years as a Hollywood costume designer under her belt. Back in 1989, she designed the costumes for Spike Lee's film "Do the Right Thing." Her brief from Lee, who most recently raised eyebrows with his film "BlacKkKlansman" (2018), was to make the costumes garish: "Bright ... blinding AFROCENTRIC bright!" were the instructions.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
Of slaves and their masters
The 1976 novel "Roots" by Alex Haley was adapted into a TV series a year later. It tells the tale of Kunta Kinte, who was abducted from Africa and brought to America as a slave. For the remake, Carter designed the costumes of several generations of both slaves and plantation owners. She received an Emmy nomination for her designs.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
Channeling Malcolm X
In the film "Malcolm X," Denzel Washington played the controversial character of Malcolm Little, who gave up his last name after a stint in prison and replaced it with an X to symbolize his African ancestry. True to form, Carter devoted herself to extensive research, even gaining access to Little's prison records to get closer to the character. Her efforts earned her a Oscar nomination.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
Oscar nod for "Amistad" costumes
Carter worked with Stephen Spielberg on the 1997 historical Hollywood film "Amistad," based on the true story of events in 1839 aboard a slave ship called La Amistad. She received her second Oscar nomination for the costumes she created for this film.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
Meticulous planning
For the film "Selma" directed by Ava DuVernay, which chronicles the voting rights' marches led by civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, Carter again conducted extensive research. This is illustrated by the countless sketches and accompanying objects at the exhibition that highlight the time she invested in designing her creations.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
From black leather jackets to goldfish platforms
"Shaft" starring Samuel L. Jackson and the 1988 parody film "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" are both about black action heroes. While in the former, Jackson's character wears a black leather jacket that harks back to the Black Panther Party, the comedic costume designs of the latter include a pair of outrageous platforms with live goldfish in the heels.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design
The doyen of Afrofuturistic design
Carter defines Afrofuturism as the marriage of "technology and imagination," and as a "philosophy that allows black Americans, Africans and Indigenous Peoples to believe and create free from slavery and colonialism." The exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Fashion + Film in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) features 60 of her costumes and will run until September 2021.
Image: Chia Chong/Savannah College of Art and Design