South Africa is a hotbed of sartorial creativity and a fashion powerhouse. Like other emerging voices from the (former) margins of the global scene, its contributions self-consciously engage with accepted stereotypes and truisms of fashionability. Most South African designers engage with the industry’s bulimic need to absorb all difference while dictating what accepted “difference” should be by creating the sort of familiar exoticism that can be both a …
This week the artistic platform Design Indaba has held its Annual Festival and handed the stage to South Africa’s top creative minds. These include Zipho Gum, aka Tony Gum, a 20-year-old film student at the the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and a social media sensation. Gum caught the collective attention with her “Coca-Cola” series showcased at Johannesburg Art Fair 2015, quickly becoming one of the foremost …
The Schomburg Center released the full stream of the event “Visually Speaking: The Timeless Art of Kamoinge” about the historic Kamoinge Workshop. The workshop was founded in 1963 with the aim of counteracting stereotypical media images of black Americans and the bias of mainstream institutions toward photographers of colour. The original group included James Ray Francis, Louis Draper, Herman Howard, Earl James and Calvin Mercer …
An interesting piece on Beyoncé’s Formation video by Dr. Nettrice Gaskins Renegade Futurism Beyonce and the secret society Trayvon Martin’s (Sandra Bland’s) birthday, Mardi Gras, Black History Month, Black Panthers’ 50th/Super Bowl’s 50th. Beyonce’s release for her latest song and music video, Formation, was strategically dropped today. Already, bloggers and critics are analyzing the video, so here I am taking …
The Kenyan duo 2manysiblings is back with the fashion & art project “Projected fragments” realized by Joseph Chege. Of all their work, this is the one I like the most – it really brings out the beauty and potential of Afrosartorial creativity. Enjoy!
Brent Luvaas, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Drexel University, is an expert of streetstyling and streetwear culture. His volume Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging is forthcoming for Bloomsbury. As I wait to read this book, I go back to Luvaas’ other insightful writings on street culture, looking for cues to help me better flesh out my own research on African streetstylers – the Afrosartorialists. …
Here is the second part of my summary of NKA’s special issue on black fashion. I put a little commentary at the bottom. *** Bill Gaskins’ interview with Anthony Barboza traces the history of one of the most representative photographers of the African American fashion scene. Barboza, who worked for Essence, GQ and an array of major publications all through …
NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art is out with a special issue on black fashion, featuring articles by eminent authors and artists. Its goal, as stated in the introduction by the editor Noliwe Rooks (Cornell University), is to approach the subject as “a launching point for thinking about race, gender, politics, powers, and class” (4). This is a good resource …
Yesterday I launched the page of my research project on Facebook with the aim of reaching out to a diversified audience of scholars and enthusiasts of African fashion. My mission is to enhance the appreciation of Africa’s contribution to culture-oriented fashion and creative work in and outside academia. This means I will not use the platform to just promote my own writing, but …
An article by Laura Havlin that appeared in AnOther Magazine back in September is a good source to get acquainted with the afrofuturist aesthetic and to point to its influence on afrosartorial trends. In particular, Havlin notes the correspondence between the afrofuturist concept of non-linear time and the knowledge that space contains multiple geographies of dwelling and belonging. This is one way of pointing to the relevance of diasporic consciousness for cultural …
