The donning of academical costumes during academic ceremonies in universities and other tertiary institutions has a long history. The practice which has become the status quo was the preserve of university education until other tertiary institutions adapted it. Sharing close ties with university education, the academical costumes by its gradation, is used to indicate the social hierarchy, academic disciplines, faculty or department of wearers. To ensure strict compliance of academic costumes politics, many universities worldwide have initiated policies guiding the use of the costumes in academic ceremonies. The culture of wearing the costumes in academic functions was greatly influenced by ecclesiastical dress of the mediaeval clergy (apparel.com 2007). The adaptation of the costumes in formal school education, especially, in universities carry both denotative and connotative signification in the academic circles. It stands for the knowledge acquired and its appropriation for the society and the nation at large.
Fashion is universal to all cultures whether ethnic, regional, national or continental. This manifest in the broad base definition of what fashion entails in contemporary times. Fashion remains inseparable from life. One of the key problems in studying fashion is that it eludes clarity about what it is and what it is not (Hopkins, 2012; Kennedy, Stoehrer & Calderin, 2013). Looking at the evidence, Hopkins (2012) theorised that fashion may be understood in the context of wider contemporary phenomena and human behaviour. Rovine (2010, p. 134) added that "Fashion is difficult to define in a global context, requiring a negotiation of the slippery territory between practices classified as 'African' and categories associated with the Western cultures." In whichever way one may view it, fashion, is not a preserve of a specific race or continent. All cultures practise it and have their respective histories that may tell its development across time. But to denigrate the artistic doings of Africa, the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910, p.326) wrote that "… with the exception of the lower Nile valley and what is known as Roman Africa …, is, so far as its native inhabitants are concerned, a continent practically without a history, and possessing no records from which such a history might be reconstructed." The early Western scholars who made attempt on researching into African fashion approached it from anthropological or ethnographical standpoint creating a complete boundary of what Rovine (2010) describes as Western and non-Western dress. Painting such a picture retarded progressive fashion research in the Continent and relented on exploring specific local and international markets for African designers. The non-Western fashion history, especially in the case of Africa, were viewed as "objects of ethnographic inquiry" (Allman, 2004, p. 2), an approach which Nkrumah (1963) insists was devised to retard social progress and prolong colonial domination over Africa.The decolonisation of fashion education and training history, in this context, means that independent Ghana must break her academic silence on the historicity of her fashion design education and training in debunking apperception that her fashion art and practice is inferior as portrayed in the case of non-Western fashion. The decolonisation process could be done through adequate study, rewriting and reorienting her peoples about her past and present fashion cultures. Due to the absence of adequate written documentation on the history of fashion in Africa, her fashion history is seldomly told. Telling the history of evolving fashion of African countries is therefore inevitable. This would help in appreciating their contribution towards global fashion in one way or the other.The world must learn about the historical antecedents of Ghana's fashion education and training. The study, therefore, traces the art-historical accounts of fashion design and fashion education in Ghana from precolonial, colonial to contemporary times with emphasis on 1920 to present. Tracing Ghana's ...
Ghana's fashion culture is predominately bespoke. People approach their designers for custom-made dresses and other fashion accessories. This fashion system has its own merits and demerits. This study has the primary objective of ascertaining the major challenges hampering the growth of dress fashion design in the Ghana fashion industry in the perspective of both beneficiary and non-beneficiary fashion designers of the direct social intervention trade policies aimed at promoting fashion development. Narrative inquiry constituted the research design. Twelve (12) fashion designer-respondents, consisting of seven (7) beneficiaries of AGOA and five (5) non-beneficiaries constituted the study sample. Semi-structured interviews enabled the respondents to share their lived experiences in their fashion design careers. It is evident from the study that major challenges hampering the growth of dress fashion design industry in Ghana include influx of smuggled cheap imported dress fashion products from the Asiatic countries, Europe and America; and retailing of dress fashion products by foreigners. Government must, ensure rigorous enforcement of the laws on smuggled goods to protect Ghanaian dress fashion businesses, while the law that proscribes foreigners in engaging in petty trading be observed strictly.
Africans have suffered stigmatisation and discrimination at the hands of the colonialists. The hair of the Black African has been negatively labelled as reclusive, elusive and shrinking kinks by the colonialists. This mentality of the colonialists equally manifested in Ghanaian colonial schools established by the early missionaries and the colonialists' governments. They bastardised and proscribed some Afrocentric hairstyles and beauty culture practices in schools in the name of good grooming and hygiene. This negative remnant of mental enslavement and the colonial legacy of anti-Afrocentric hairstyles in Ghanaian schools lingers on and is still perpetuated by some Ghanaian school authorities in Senior High Schools in contemporary times. In the effort to decolonise the bastadised and proscribed Afrocentric hairstyle practices in Ghanaian schools, this article explored the contradictions and or conflicting tensions in the process. The study found that the Ghanaian public schools proscribe Afrocentric hairstyles with no substantial scientific evidence that wearing afro and rasta inhibits the acquisition of creative and innovative thinking, and academic performance or progress of the students. Neither have the schools established from their arguments that wearing Afrocentric hairstyles negatively impacts on the socio-moral and cultural wellbeing of the Ghanaian society or indigenous culture.It recommends that the Ghana Education Service and the Conference of Heads of Assisted Senior High Schools (CHASS) must work together to review the hair policies for students,so that it will not be a bottleneck for students to have access to education, which is their fundamental right enshrined in the 1992 constitution.
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