Mode & Styles in afrikanischen Städten. Fallbeispiele aus Douala und Lagos.
Afrika-, Amerika- und Ozeanienbezogene Wissenschaften
Ethnologie und Europäische Ethnologie
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
With our intertwined focus on fashion and styles in the Afropolis, we aimed to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the globalization of fashion and fashion theory within the interdisciplinary field of art history, anthropology and design studies. Historically, ‘fashion and city’ have been regarded as marginal phenomena within the African context, and fashion research is still a neglected field in African Studies. Instead, our project – a cooperation between art historians and anthropologists from Germany, Nigeria and Cameroon – started from the understanding of fashion and sartorial practices as being a relevant interface between significant spheres of contemporary culture. Based on empirical research that systematically captured the interplay between fashion and urban spaces, between the various actors as well as the importance of the media, our exploration started with a regional comparative approach between three cities: Dakar, Douala and Lagos. In each of the three cities, we encountered dynamic and widely networked fashion scenes that address different audiences. They by far transcend the cities’ physical boundaries – not only in the present, but also in the past, as we have shown with regard to the Afro-Brazilian fashion trendsetters in early twentieth-century Lagos. (Historical) contexts like these inspired our desideratum, to challenge westerngenerated assumptions and dichotomies to grasp fashion. By adapting the notion of the fashionscape, we put forward an understanding of fashion and place that is not marked by unity but shaped by flows. We relied on a precise analysis of local, vernacular terms and concepts and a close examination of the works of fashion makers, both tailors and fashion designers. Far from conceiving cities as possessing an all-encompassing and unique Eigenart that would have an effect on each and every part, we found connections between distinctive metropolitan cultures of consumption, shops and shopping, the wearing of fashionable dress in the spaces of the city, the long history of representation and media. The dynamism of each city seemed to be particularly evident in its form of mobility and public transport. Thus, it was hardly surprising that these urban icons appear as design references or backgrounds in fashion photography. In addition, fashion designers go far beyond using the urban environment as a source of inspiration and setting: through récupération they also take the city’s material as a resource and make the city’s globally interconnected position visible. However, these ties between city and fashion design, we encountered, are far from being literal ‘depictions’; rather they take the form of interpretation and evocation of the respective cities’ atmospheres, histories and idiosyncrasies. Referencing and incorporating the urban thus takes place through imagery, through the cities’ materialities and through a conceptual level. Apart from carving out the complex ties and entanglements between fashion and the city, our empirical approach drew our attention to other current tendencies. Fashion design with its visual, material and narrative potentiality to negotiate societal issues and political debates, plays an ever-growing part in (cultural) activist performances, the negotiation of nonheteronormative gender relations being only one example. We documented a growing preoccupation with materiality, tactile processes and technologies of the ‘past’, paired with a new attitudes towards a ‘modern craft’ with a strong agenda towards future-building. Furthermore, this can be applied most importantly to strategies and tools fashion designers employ in order to uncover the past, to keep established skills, aesthetics and sartorial practices alive and to update them in line with present and future needs. They rely on the narrative potentials of fabrics, cuts and colours, among others, to evoke imagery on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to literally strengthen the ties between a network of cities as well as with rural areas. Thus, we see these attitudes as a means to (re)connect with older textile production and craft centres – not just as a form of self-assurance, but also to suggest fashion designs and sartorial styles which are distinctly local yet globally connected. For future research we intend to take up some of the findings of this research – with respect to 1) the notion of a ‘modern craft’ and its strong ties towards future-making practice, 2) the important role of Asia – and totally neglected so far – in particular of Japan when it comes to cultural production and 3) the practice of ‘sartorial code-mixing’ as a serious approach from the continent to propose alternative ways of practicing and thinking decolonization that also act beyond allegedly clear-cut oppositions.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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2018, Making Fashion, Forming Bodies and Persons in Urban Senegal, in: Africa Development 43 (1): 5–20
Kastner, Kristin
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2019, Fashioning Dakar’s Urban Society. Sartorial Code Mixing in Senegal, in: Sociologus 69 (2): 167–88
Kastner, Kristin
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2022, Conceptual Design and Fashion’s Futures in the Afropolis, in: Greiner, Clemens, Bollig, Michael, Van Wolputte, Steven (eds), African Futures. Brill Publishers: Leiden, 251-262
Pinther, Kerstin
