African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style

Gott, Suzanne; Loughran, Kristyne; Quick, Betsy D.; Rabine, Leslie W.

doi:10.1162/afar_a_00331

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Previous studies have dealt with (re)conceptualizing the notion of "ethnic dress" (Forney and Rabolt, 1986;Baizerman et al 1993;Zorn, 1998). Recent research on ethnic dress aligned with politics and social mobility has engaged a new agenda on memory, nostalgia, and agency in diasporic groups (Clark, 2012;Kamal, 2014;Gott et al, 2017). Ethnic dress has become the way in which ethnic members negotiate their agency and identities with the mainstream (Akou, 2007).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local fashion, global imagination: Agency, identity, and aspiration in the diasporic Hmong community

Shi

2022

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Dress has been used as a visual avowal of social status, personality, personal taste, identity, and philosophy throughout history. This article aims to assess the changing dress practices and understand the meaning of ethnic dress in the diasporic community in a super-connected era. This article examines the cultural–historical contexts that contribute to dress practices at the macro level and individuals’ perceptions at the micro level. This article demonstrates how the Hmong experience can contribute to the knowledge of dress as a vehicle of agency, identity, and aspiration in fashion and material culture studies. In doing so, this article provides new insights into a growing area of research by exploring the emotionality of materials in terms of how imagination and aspiration of ethnicity are inscribed in and ascribed to dress and clothing in diasporic groups.

show abstract

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Local fashion, global imagination: Agency, identity, and aspiration in the diasporic Hmong community

Shi

2022

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For more on the Nanas Benz's story and their significance in the political-economy of colonial and postcolonial Togo, see Nina Sylvanus' ethnography of the Dutch wax trade in Lomé, Patterns in Circulation (2016) and Comi Toulabor's 'Les Nanas Benz de Lomé' (2012). For more on wax cloth dress practices in West Africa, see Gott et al (2017). Savon de Marseille is a gentle soap that, as the name indicates, and like Dutch wax cloth itself, is another appropriated commodity that integrated Togolese markets via colonial-era trade networks.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

African luxury: aesthetics and politics

Sykes¹

2021

Luxury

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Some might assume that the phrase ' African luxury' is an oxymoron, certainly not considering the notion that Africans are the consumers of said luxury. At the time of writing, entering the search keywords ' Africa' and 'luxury' into Google Scholar resulted not in scholarly work that engaged critically, or indeed otherwise, with how luxury consumer cultures play out in African settings, but rather in numerous articles that use the idea of 'luxury' as a rhetorical device to ask whether certain developmental needs are necessities or 'nice-to-haves' for Africans. For example, one question raised is whether the availability of adolescent psychiatry is a 'luxury' for African communities (Robertson et al. 2010), and it is also considered how, in certain Aids-stricken African contexts, it might be a 'luxury' to grieve for loved ones lost to the disease (Demmer 2007).While there is extensive scholarship examining various aspects of contemporary consumer cultures and identities in Africa, including those of elite actors and demographics (Dosekun 2020; Huigen 2017;Iqani 2015) and those centred on expensive goods -and indeed their symbolic destruction, in the case of the South African township culture, izikhotane (Howell and Vincent 2014) -'luxury' has been little considered as a distinct category thus far, moreover as distinct from 'conspicuous consumption' . Some attention to luxury can be found in work on other global south 1 locations -often, tellingly, more in relation to so-called 'new' middle classes than the 'elites' or 'super-elites' of concern in the global North (Brosius 2012;Fernandes 2006; Lange and Meier 2009;Southall 2016). There is, for example, work on luxury accommodation in gated communities in Bangalore, India (Upadhya 2009); on the growing popularity of luxury golf courses in China (Zhang et al. 2009); and on middle-class Thai consumers' savvy expenditure on affordable 'fast fashion' , complemented with 'substantial investments in expensive western branded goods -a Prada bag, a pair of Gucci sunglasses' , which gives them entry into elite consumer spaces, and which are often resold or traded at 'luxury goods exchanges' (Arvidsson and Niessen 2015: 9; Wattanasuwan 1999). At the same time, in both the larger and more established body of scholarship on luxury from business, marketing and management studies (Cavender and Kincade 2014;Dubois and Duquesne 1993; Kapferer and Bastien 2012; Truong et al. 2008), and in the emergent field of critical luxury studies concerned with the cultural and other politics of what is contemporarily deemed luxury (Armitage and Roberts 2016; Featherstone 2014), the focus is almost exclusively on the global North.African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics emerges from, and begins to fill, these multi-faceted gaps. With original case studies spanning the continent, from Togo to the former Zaire to Angola, the book moves beyond predominant imaginaries of Africa as a place to be 'saved' or 'aided' , as well as more recent, teleological formulations of it as 'rising' , to foreground a...

show abstract

“…How digital images of fashionable styles might afford similar avenues for upward social mobility has attracted little attention in the literature on fashion in Cameroon (Pommerolle and Ngaméni 2015;Röschenthaler 2015;Mougoué 2019) or in West Africa more broadly (e.g. Allman 2004;Hansen and Madison 2013;Gott et al 2017;Sylvanus 2019;Dosekun 2020), even as studies of social media influencers proliferate in the field of media studies (e.g. Marwick 2015;Abidin 2018;Arriagada 2021;Iqani 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Allman 2004; Hansen and Madison 2013; Gott et al . 2017; Sylvanus 2019; Dosekun 2020), even as studies of social media influencers proliferate in the field of media studies (e.g. Marwick 2015; Abidin 2018; Arriagada 2021; Iqani 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Majczak

2023

Africa

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Against the background of post-Cold War trade and media liberalization, this article examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building the woman’s name as a digital ‘fashionista’, in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is actualized among women of status and rank, young women can fashion relations of matronage, opening up avenues of upward social mobility. To reach out to women of status and rank, young women circulate images of their styles to mobilize digital follower networks of peers, kin and strangers, drawing on their skills, status and knowledge. This mobilization in turn relies on the actual and potential benefits that sharing a fashionista image can bring to the follower. Thus, I argue, interdependencies between stylish leaders and their followers are key to making and maintaining a name as a digital fashionista. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks generates potentialities for young women living in Yaoundé to fashion matronage relations and social mobility. More broadly, the framing of followers as a form of wealth-in-people provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers, illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.

show abstract

African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style

Cited by 13 publications

References 20 publications

Local fashion, global imagination: Agency, identity, and aspiration in the diasporic Hmong community

Local fashion, global imagination: Agency, identity, and aspiration in the diasporic Hmong community

African luxury: aesthetics and politics

Digital fashionistas: young women, wealth-in-followers and matronage in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About