Remapping the worldview of fashion

This ethnographic study of streetwear designers in Dakar, Senegal explores the way that five artist/designers create images of maps and relate them to concepts of ‘identity’ far different from those in western fashion discourse. The designers recode these and other concepts into a Wolof signifying system. They connect ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ to Wolof cultural values like ‘thiossane’ and ‘askan,’ words which do not translate directly into European languages. With such words and images, the streetwear designers invite us to question basic concepts in western fashion studies, to doubt if we can apply these universally. In this article, the term fashion map has two intertwined meanings. First, it refers to the standard schema of ‘world fashion cities’. Second, artistic map images are also fashion statements. As the Dakar designers create map images that express their cultural concerns, they also redraw this standard world fashion map.