KADIR NELSON FOR THE NEW YORKER + A SHORT EXTRACT FROM MY UPCOMING PAPER ON RETROSPECTIVE AFRO-SARTORIALISM

To celebrate its ninetieth anniversary, the next issue of The New Yorker will come out in nine different covers. Each one was handed to an artist with the task of re-imagining the iconic drawing, showing a gentlemen with the beaver hat and monocle (a.k.a.Eustace Tilley), that appeared on the magazine’s first cover of February 1925. One of the nine covers is an oil painting by Kadir …

THE REDUCTIVE AESTHETICS OF ‘AFROPOLITAN’ FASHION

These past few days I have come across two (more) articles documenting the success of African fashion with Western customers, one by a niche publication, and another one by a major news platform. In both cases, ‘African dress’, a rich signifier encompassing a host of different practices and trends, is reduced to a very specific and limited typology of sartorial fashion, aimed predominantly at …

JÉRÉMY BARNIAUD’S PHOTOGRAPHY: BLIPSTERS REAPPROPRIATING THE STREETS

Dynamic Africa, a platform that focuses on the popular culture and visual aesthetics of contemporary Africanness, has recently reblogged on its Tumblr account a photostory by Jérémy Barniaud on black male fashion. No garment openly invokes ‘traditional’ African items, but the creative syncretism that fuses past and present sartorial languages recalls the hipster aesthetics of acclaimed street style icons from the continents, like Loux …

THE FASHION OF DEVOTION OF SENEGALESE BAYE FALL

It is hard to come by information on the vestimentary practices of the Muslim brotherhood of the Baye Fall in the popular press, but last month Nicole Crowder published an article about it in The Washington Post that I will index as an updated reference on the subject of African fashion and devotion. ‘The roots of fashion and spirituality in Senegal’s Islamic brotherhood, the Baye Fall’ is a …