Creating African Fashion Histories

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Creating African Fashion Histories focuses on the intersection between African clothing and museum work. The dynamism of African fashion has been a disruption to conventional museum practice as curators cast African bodily adornment as "dress" while restricting "fashion" to the West's historical trajectory. Yet scholars of African fashion and museums have to date benefited from very little dialogue between their respective fields. This volume breaks new ground by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of Africanist scholars and curators to discuss sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories. Creating African Fashion Histories seeks to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of the past that might otherwise have been obscured? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the material legacies encapsulated in collections, catalogs, and displays? From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this groundbreaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.