Category: Afrochic

Happy New Year!

If you are planning on attending CAA2019, I will be presenting the paper, “Afrochic: Race and the Emergence of American Fashion,” on the following panel:

Race in the History of Design: Objects, Identity, Methodologies | Design Studies Forum (formerly Design Forum: History, Criticism and Theory) | New York Hilton Midtown – 2nd Floor – Regent | February 15, 2019 | 6:00 – 7:30 pm

Since I had to leave some material on the cutting room floor, I thought I would share it here. My talk will be focused on the 1923 Primitive Negro Art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art but during the course of my research I came across this earlier example of African cultural appropriation related to the following garment purchased by the American Museum of Natural History in 1917:

 

The garment is identified as a “Hausa man’s robe” from Nigeria. It was one of many “documents” from around the world that fashion designers were encouraged to draw inspiration from when formulating modern American designs.

It was placed in the center of the one of the displays at the Exhibition of Industrial Arts held at AMNH in 1919. This exhibition was a showcase for how a unique American design aesthetic could be generated by gleaning from the global array of history and culture contained in museums.

In the detail above you can see the garment as well as the textile that it inspired directly below it.

Another textile designer came up with a more abstracted all-over pattern for a cretonne fabric based on the garment in 1918.

The fashion designer Jessie Franklin Turner decided to reinterpret the garment as a caftan-style negligee in 1918. It was made of wisteria velvet with wool embroidery in coordinating colors.

I have also found this 1920s scarf in the Brooklyn Museum of Art Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that bears a pattern reminiscent of the garment’s embroidery.

For some reason, a number of designers found this one particular garment of African origin especially fascinating and it sparked their creativity as they mined the globe in an effort to develop a new American design language.

This garment was so noteworthy that more than two decades later, Jessie Franklin Turner based another dress upon it for a 1940 exhibition for the Museum of Costume Art (precursor to the MET’s Costume Institute) that once again intended to highlight how global cultures could inspire American design.

If this tangent whets your curiosity come see my talk on February 15th! The whole panel promises to be really interesting. Hope to see you there!

 

 

I haven’t posted in a while and recently when I have shown my face I invariably get asked what I have been up to so here is a little a taste of the research that I will be presenting at a CAA2019 talk titled, “Afrochic: Race and the Emergence of American Fashion.”

Above are some of the reading materials that I have been delving into and here is the abstract for my talk:

This paper considers the role of race in the formation of modern fashion design. Early in twentieth century, Women’s Wear editor, M. D. C. Crawford, and the Brooklyn Museum’s Curator of Ethnology, Stewart Culin, forged a productive alliance between the museum and fashion worlds to foster the development of American design. Simultaneously, colonial enterprises delivered increased information about Africa to Western audiences and its raw materials to the marketplace. As the fashion industry sought to contribute to the national effort to modernize lifestyle and taste, it capitalized on the precedent of the primitivist vogue that had sparked a fundamental reinvention of art and culture amongst the avant-garde. When Culin organized the exhibition Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo in 1923, it showcased not just the aesthetic merits of African expressive culture but its suitability as inspiration for modern fashion. The garment prototypes designed to accompany the show and the promotional rhetoric orchestrated by Crawford reveal that in addition to the appropriation of African design principles and styles, entrenched cultural myths about Africa and racial beliefs profoundly affected emergent fashion trends. Through the lens of fashion, where many would least expect it, this paper demonstrates that race played a significant role in the nation’s modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reinventing American identity, aesthetics and mode of dress didn’t entail abandoning the nation’s traditional recourse to race. Arguably the triumph of the American Century hinged upon an Africanist presence lending its currency to the culture industry. 

I will leave you with a sample image that will feature in the presentation demonstrating how Kuba textiles were looked to for inspiration for modern American fashion.

For more Afrochic news, you can visit my new page. Hope to see you at CAA!