African-Print Fashion Now!

African-Print Fashion Now! introduces visitors to a dynamic and diverse African dress tradition and the increasingly interconnected fashion worlds that it inhabits: popular African-print styles created by local seamstresses and tailors across the continent; international runway fashions designed by Africas newest generation of couturiers; and boundary-breaking, transnational, and youth styles favored in Africas urban centers. All feature the colorful, boldly designed, manufactured cotton textiles that have come to be known as African-print cloth. The book tells the global stories of these textilesthe early history of the print cloth trade in West and Central Africa, the expansion of production following independence movements, and the increasing popularity of Asian-made print cloth today. Popular African styles from Ghana, Nigeria, Cote dIvoire, Cameroon, and Senegal are featured, as well as groundbreaking runway fashions by some of Africas most talented couturiers: Ituen Basi, Gilles Tour, Lanre da Silva Ajayi, Titi Ademola, Lisa Folawiyo, Dent de Man, Adama Paris, Patricia Waota, Ikir Jones, and Afua Dabanka. Black-and-white studio portraits illuminate print fashions of the 1960s and 1970s, while works by contemporary artists incorporate African print to convey evocative messages about heritage, hybridity, displacement, and aspiration. Contemporary photographs by Omar Victor Diop, Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, and Hassan Hajjaj; paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga; and a mural by graffiti artist Docta suggest the ever-present role of fashion in African life. Throughout the volume, African-print fashions are considered as creative responses to key historical moments and the imaginings of Africa in the future.