On Sunday, I will be presenting a photographic and discursive journey of fashion history in Africa to explore and incorporate into our social and political memory ideas of womanhood through looking at fashion. We are going to look at the past 100 or so years and for each decade I will explore a particular geographical region and a specific type of clothing to show how fashion is embedded in body politics and cultural expression.
Fashion has been a way of developing a distinctive African modernity so my study aims to transcend this idea that Africa is a continent without fashion, and show how on the contrary, it has always very much been used as a negotiating between style, identity, gender, citizenship and so on.
If you are in Berlin, come down to Ballhaus Naunynstrasse on Sunday, you can check out the programme here. Otherwise keep an eye for posts covering the event and the theme.
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