International Journal of Fashion Studies - Decolonizing Fashion as Process, Oct 2022

Throughout the fashion year in Lagos, events take place across the city. The pre-eminent event is Lagos Fashion Week (LFW). A key event in the fashion calendar on the African continent, this is where designers are consecrated in the fashion field, and where social and economic capital is delineated. This article describes the strategies employed by the designers and attendees to realize and self-represent their creations. To some degree, LFW is more accessible than the dominant western fashion weeks (New York, etc.) and offers the potential for actors to destabilize that system and its inherited colonial ideologies. LFW provides a platform for self-representation and for legitimizing alternative identities, some of which challenge an embedded patriarchy. A vibrant competitive display of street fashion, covered by international journalists and photographers, offers further possibilities for the articulation of contemporary identities, which challenge the legacies of stereotypical colonial representations of African dress. At the same time, certain western conventions are reproduced, such as the celebration and legitimization of individual designers over the hidden labour of artisans. The article suggests that LFW might serve to facilitate decolonial processes once designers employ equitable fashion practices and represent the voices of the artisans.

Discourses on traditional textile and craft practices, focusing on participatory and emancipatory approaches, disregard epistemologies and ontologies other than that of the researcher and invest in reformation, through new technology and modernization, of traditional practices. While these mainstream narratives have ignored the presence of non-western realities, this article takes the example of Somaiya Kala Vidya, a design institute based in Kutch, India, that provides traditional textile artisans with design education for capability-building, enabling sustenance in the current fashion paradigm: a product of systematic erasure of local systems by the West. Artisans exposed to design education display unique creative identities alongside their collective cultural identities. They challenge fashion hegemonies by navigating the tensions between ‘perceived’ local and global, modernity and tradition. The study brings forth the complexity of modernization processes; a by-product of design education, resulting in the deconstruction and reconstruction of traditional knowledge in the community. This examination of creative identities, aspirations and traditional knowledge of artisans demonstrates the need of decolonizing the fashion industry’s approach to the craft ecosystem, contributing to an essential discussion of pluralistic realities.

Fashion has been seen as either a rejection or an embracing of history and the past. In reality, fashion is constantly changing – is fragmentary, transitory and borderless. Because fashion has no borders, it can be brave, bold and often contradictory, just as the women who design and wear it can themselves present unique ambiguities worth exploring. Grounded in field and curatorial research with three generations of Senegalese fashion designers, this article explores the ways in which women in Dakar and Saint-Louis reinscribe problematic histories in sartorial expressions and shift the narrative away from a ‘colonial’ past and into a potential and ideological future imaginary. Each designer envisions and amplifies women’s voices, concerns and constructions of histories, despite discrepancies. And yet, in these very discrepancies lie the defiance of a colonial articulation of the past. As this article argues, decolonial creativity lies in the fault lines of history and can be selectively mined. This interpellation of the traditional/historical highlights an association of tradition with fixity and a distancing of fashion from the past that does not recognize the reality of African experiences. Instead, as a constant renegotiation of the past in the present, it blurs these boundaries and is constantly in flux.

India’s fashion industry experienced spectacular growth in the decades after economic liberalization. The positive outlook brought about by liberalization led to the development of a culture of design built on the backs of textile crafts centred around material excess informed by re-orientalist viewpoints as well as selective references to India’s freedom movement. Most recently, however, a newer generation of designers shunned the visual exuberance that had become the hallmark of Indian couture. Yet even as they refrain from the visual stereotypes made popular by the preceding design fraternity, they continue to foreground Gandhian principles and the sartorial politics of Indian nationalism in their design statements and approach to craftivism. The difference, however, is in the way these are reframed to substantiate the cultural relevance, authenticity and purity of a more minimalist design product. This article closely examines the emergence of such minimalist fashion and highlights the paradoxes that emerge through anti-colonial, pre-colonial and postcolonial references that are evidence of the incomplete nature of the process of decolonization. This article will argue that such ambiguity is a natural outcome of neo-liberal market forces and the realities of creating exclusive luxury fashion while working with crafts in a philanthrocapitalist framework.

From the end of the last 1976 military dictatorship, the Buenos Aires underground scene comprised of a web of aesthetic experiences that challenged the conventional ways of dominant culture. Intermeshing art, bodies and politics in an unprecedented and radical way, the artists involved in this scene in the 1980s created relational practices, joyful moments and venues for cultural production. At the end of the decade, young artists and designers of Genios Pobres (Poor Geniuses) gave rise to innovative productions between art, fashion and design. Drawing from interviews with several members of Genios Pobres, this text follows some experiences of the group, with the intention of recovering a compelling yet hardly explored chapter of Argentinian cultural history.

The stylized fashion figure or croqui is fundamental to the fashion design process. Highly regarded as a tool for design articulation and innovation, it is also an immensely popular creative art form, enjoying a recent renaissance on social media platforms. Most fashion institutions across the globe teach illustration as a foundation-level skill. Students absorb a strict set of rules dictated by the ten-head body proportion. This article explores the colonial implications of the stylized croqui. The drawings challenge the genre by selectively abandoning and playing with the rules of fashion illustration in order to decolonize this design tool.

Research in fashion to expose dominant Eurocentric narratives tends to focus on fashion theories and histories, neglecting fashion design processes, especially within studio-based practices and in education. However, analysing how colonial systems reproduce Eurocentric fashion knowledge in the fashion design process might help locate alternative heterogeneous ways to practise and teach fashion design. Drawing on Tlostanova’s coloniality of design concept, this article investigates how gendered, racialized and capitalist disciplinary forces have underpinned the tools and equipment used in the fashion classroom. To expose the racial hierarchies underpinning fashion requires rethinking some of the dominant assumptions of Eurocentric fashion epistemologies to contextualize the sociocultural contexts of fashion.

A young bride and groom, Zeynab Dieng (25) and Abdoulaye Ly (28), asked me to photograph their Muslim/Peulh wedding festivities in Dakar, Senegal. Dakarois wedding celebrations centre around the bride, who demonstrates her dignity and savoir faire as a new matron by appearing in a succession of fashionable outfits. Within the Senegalese fashion system, these outfits fall into the style categories labelled ‘ethnic’, ‘pan-African’ and ‘European’. Among the many Senegalese weddings that I have attended and photographed, the wedding of Abdoulaye and Zeynab was startlingly original in its fashions and its rituals. Abdoulaye, Zeynab and their siblings performed a ceremony of freedom on their own terms. My study addresses interwoven processes of colonization/decolonization. The first concerns my own far-from-complete process of attempting to decolonize my mind and practice. The second process concerns the refusing-to-die colonial dichotomy of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ with respect to fashion and weddings. Instead of applying colonial labels to the fashions and the wedding, I try to see these through the lens of the Dakarois youth imaginary. How do Zeynab, Abdoulaye and their contemporaries interpret the decolonizing/neo-colonizing forces they navigate in creating fashions and in shaping their own lives?

Decolonizing debates have the potential to revitalize fashion studies by placing greater emphasis on the way we practise, and the conditions under which we see, hear and speak about fashion imagery. Decolonializing projects and anti-racist activism suggest new methodologies and transformational insights, which are riddled with contradictions and personal vulnerabilities. This article reflects on museums and fashion photography as spaces of decolonial reckoning and paradox. Understanding and coming to terms with positionality, a crucial factor in decolonial praxis, emerges as a continually unfolding process of action and compromise in which the researcher may ultimately ground herself.

A paradigmatic shift is needed if the Fashion industry is to put the well-being of people, their lifeways and the earth first. Like degrowth, defashion involves a deep reduction in material and energy throughputs in clothing production, but it goes much beyond this standard approach to sustainability. The required shift is comparable to the revolutionary change that must be made to the global economic system in order to achieve degrowth and is encapsulated in the definition of the term ‘defashion’. The neologism is a call to action: to dismantle the current Fashion system and replace it with a pluriverse of clothing systems that are fair, local, decolonial and profoundly respectful and nurturing. The activist group, Fashion Act Now, which is launching the term, proposes the clothing commons as a post-fashion strategy.