Dress and fashion practices in Africa and the diaspora are dynamic and diverse, whether on the street or on the fashion runway. Focusing on the dressed body as a performance site, African Dress explores how ideas and practices of dress contest or legitimize existing power structures through expressions of individual identity and the cultural and political order. Drawing on innovative, interdisciplinary research by established and up and coming scholars, the book examines real life projects and social transformations that are deeply political, revolving around individual and public goals of dignity, respect, status, and morality. With its remarkable scope, this book will attract students and scholars of fashion and dress, material culture and consumption, performance studies, and art history in relation to Africa and on a global scale.

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.

Celebrating African costumes and textiles, this volume draws on historical and modern pieces from the Zaira and Marcel Mis Collection. The extraordinary works presented exemplify the craftsmanship of highly skilled African weavers and provide insight into the lives and culture of various ethnic groups. Whether the materials used are wool, cotton, silk, raffia, or bark, the patterns the weavers produce are predominantly geometric and abstract, but highly stylized figurative motifs are also found. The designs frequently illustrate excerpts from historical or mythical stories. The book presents a breathtaking variety of costumes, textiles, and accessories used for everyday wear and for special celebrations, and explores the different techniques, influences, and meanings behind these colorful works of art. The essays describe the history of the development of these techniques and the richness of the symbolism in this form of cultural heritage. The superb photography showcases the splendor of these intricate and exquisite textiles.

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

The universal act of dressing—shared by both men and women, young and old, rich and poor, minority and majority—has shaped human interactions, communicated hopes and fears about the future, and embodied what it means to be Somali. Heather Marie Akou mines politics and history in this rich and compelling study of Somali material culture. Akou explores the evolution of Somali folk dress, the role of the Somali government in imposing styles of dress, competing forms of Islamic dress, and changes in Somali fashion in the U.S. With the collapse of the Somali state, Somalis continue a connection with their homeland and community through what they wear every day.

Drawing examples from a wide range of African cultures, this ground-breaking book expands the continuing discourse on the aesthetic and cultural significance of cloth, body and dress in Africa and moves beyond contextual analysis to consider the broader application of cloth and dress to art forms in other media. In blending the concerns of Art History and Anthropology, the authors focus on the art patronage systems that stimulate production, consumption, commodification and cultural meaning, and emphasize the overriding importance of cloth to aesthetic and cultural expression in African societies. Through this approach they reveal complex processes that involve a series of actors, including textile artists, commissioning-patrons and consumer-patrons, all of whom shape cloth and dress traditions. These individuals not only influence production, but are a key to understanding the cultural meaning of cloth and dress and, by extension, the body in Africa.

Accurately rendered collection of 29 authentic costumes and accessories for two dolls. Loose-flowing agbada gown for a Yoruba man, animal skins for a Luo warrior from Kenya, simply draped robes and striped shawls for a Masai man and woman, and more, plus fanciful headdresses, shields, drums, masks, and other tribal artifacts.