Afronline – The Voice Of Africa

Last May, Vogue Italia devoted their entire issue to Africa and called it “Rebranding Africa”. Naturally, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon was on the cover. The issue details the Vogue expedition into Africa, with editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani pleading with Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan to build an “African Rodeo Drive”, and gallantly emerging with development statistics, trend reports and photo spreads that purposefully did not include anything “sad, trashy or poor”.

If the articles read like NGO-funded, feel-good “development” stories that make you half-expect a request for donations in the envelope enclosed, it might be because Sozzani has been appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for Fashion4Development — a UN initiative intended to ‘help’ Africa.

The Vogue Italia issue is just one example of the pervasive patronizing frameworks underlying the sudden discovery of fashion and hence, ‘modernity’, on the continent. Even journalists seem to surprise themselves when, as the New York Times put it, “Africa is in the news — but not just for the sad and familiar reasons of conflict and suffering.”

But who is rebranding Africa really? And for what purpose? How much does the shift towards “positivity”, as Sozzani refers to it, actually accomplish if the main narrative still offers Africa as a continent to consume, save or exploit? Most importantly, do the tokenizing special issues really only work to allow the industry to exclude and marginalize African professionals from the fashion arena?

Indeed, a close look at the fashion industry today reveals much more than just the latest trends. In fashion and fashion media, binaries — like the local and the global, the modern and the traditional, the civilized and the barbaric — are constantly being constructed, fastened and reified.

As designers continue to release fantasy collections inspired by their latest trip to exotic, mystical and faraway lands (Michael Kors, Giorgio Armani) and fashion editorials feature white models amidst backgrounds of hyper-sexualized dark bodies in seemingly equally dark continents (Daria Werbowy for Interview Magazine), it is clear that for the fashion world, Africa represents a sort of otherness.

That otherness, and especially the sexuality of the other, is marketed as flavor and spice, something new, sexually raw and stimulating. Whether depicted in high-fashion advertisements or on the runway, racial difference becomes both at once threateningly pleasurable and seductively dangerous, positioning it at the intersection of most intimate obsessions with desire and death.

The commodification of difference — with its relation to the primitive — also necessitates a sense of moral duty to conquer and civilize with law and refinement. The mechanisms of exotifying and eroticizing difference operating through discourses of fashion, travel, leisure, and style deeply effect the ways in which those part of the dominant cultures consume, whether they are sex tourists or suburban mall fashionistas.

Despite the fact that there are still hardly any people of color designers, buyers, stylists, models or organizers in the mainstream fashion industry, the catwalk essentialism continues, as do the one-time, one-issue only ‘development’ features on African or otherwise ‘ethnic’ fashion. But hey, at least blackface doesn’t happen anymore, right? Oh, wait.

Ten years ago, Senegalese designer Adama Paris created Dakar Fashion Week in an effort to highlight local designs and celebrate Senegalese fashion, art, and self-expression. Although its beginnings were humble, it has now become a major platform for Senegalese and other international designers to showcase their talents. This year featured designers from over 15 countries including Morocco, Pakistan, Haiti, Mali, Egypt and Ivory Coast, and was made open to the public.

I spoke to Adama Paris (née Adama Amanda Ndiaye), about her opinion on the representation of African designs and designers in the fashion industry.

Why did you start Dakar Fashion Week?

I wanted to create a platform for African designers that wanted to show their work in Africa and to showcase their designs to African buyers and viewers. During the past 10 years, it’s been getting bigger and better. We’re getting lots of interest from designers all over the continent, which is great. We’re aiming to be a big fashion week like Paris or London – to really be able to showcase any designer who wants to sell and show their designs in Africa.

You mentioned that designers sometimes have difficulty in finding local and international markets to distribute their creations.

Yes, it’s getting better but really slowly. It definitely affects designers’ work. If you spend months to create a collection and you’re not able to sell it afterwards…it’s really the worst thing that can happen to a designer. We’re doing it first for the fashion but we’re also doing it because it’s our job. I don’t do anything else. I’m a designer. It’s not like I design on the side and I work in the bank. If you can’t pay your rent doing whatever you do, it’s really hard.

I don’t think it’s affecting the creativity of the designers but I think it’s changing the pace of creation. If you have money or someone that’s buying your stuff, you can make a lot, but if you don’t have that much, you can’t even make two collections a year. So of course it affects us a lot.

Continue reading on Africa is a country

By Tanya Bindra