Fashion Cities Africa–Celebrating Africa’s Contemporary Fashion Scene

She says:

“The intricacy and detail of the kaftans, and learning about the process is fascinating — the buttons are made in one town, the beading is done in another, before being sent back to the designer. That’s why they can cost tens of thousands of pounds.”

2Many Siblings, Nairobi.

Jennings describes some African designers as “revolutionary” in their desire to mix things up. She points to Lagos-based Maki Oh and 2manysiblings in Nairobi as being ones to watch during this exhibition.

Maki Oh, Lagos.

Meanwhile, Helen Mears, the museum’s Keeper of World Art, co-curated the exhibition along with her colleague Martin Pel. She points to the current surge of interest in the continent, particularly in the arts, and describes the process of putting the exhibition together as a “phenomenal learning experience“.

The fashion industry in Nigeria is Africa’s most well-established and Lagos Fashion Week has been running for five years now. Visitors can see the designs of Meena, Uju Offiah and Maxivive on display in film and in the flesh.

Also featured is the work of the Stranger concept store in Lagos, which caters for Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry and the music industry and whose fans include Michelle Obama, Beyonce and model Alek Wek. However, actually getting the items to feature in the display sometimes proved problematic, and not just in terms of logistics. “The fashion scene in Casablanca and Nairobi is quite small. But the designers in Lagos didn’t need the exhibition, they already have their profile,” Mears says.

Regarding “SNAPSHOT”, Pool described the book as capturing “a snapshot of the contemporary African fashion scene”.

“All of the designers featured in the exhibition are included in the book but we have more space to include even more people. The book includes essays on each city and features profiles of the various featured designers,” she explains.

“We spent a lot of time deciding which cities to go to and why, and it was important that these essays weren’t written in London, just looking at websites. But because of the timeline of the book, I couldn’t visit all the cities. Overall what really stood out was the level of creativity and energy happening across the continent. Often, discussion about African fashion can be very Nigerian-focused and we wanted to counteract that,” she says.

However, Mears speaking on the project says, “We are always interested in what’s happening in contemporary art and design. We have amazing textiles from West Africa but our collection stops around the 1940s. Brighton Museum and Art gallery holds an important collection of historical African textiles, mostly gathered between 1880 to 1940 and the museum hopes to update its collection after the exhibition. We’ve been lucky enough to get funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to extend that.” she added.

There is also a section on the infrastructure of the fashion industry in the continent. For example, countries including Ethiopia, Swaziland, Lesotho and Kenya have government-backed schemes to increase textile production in the face of competition from India, China and Bangladesh.

When major European designers often fail to acknowledge African influences or use the continent only as an exotic backdrop in fashion shoots, the Fashion Cities Africa exhibition is welcome.

Some three years in its gestation, it is now hoped that the exhibition will also go on display in museums in Amsterdam.

■ Fashion Cities Africa is on at the Brighton Museum and Gallery until January 2017.

2manysiblings present Thrift Social for Fashion Cities Africa, 16 June; 2manysiblings in Conversation, 18 June.

Fashion Cities Africa is published by Intellect (£20) and is available from Amazon.co.uk and all good bookshops.

Source:voice-online.co.uk