Suddenly, Africa

I’m an African American who has always been keenly aware of the essential contradiction of trying to live up to both appellations at once. And over the course of my life I have found that the contradiction tends to swell up to its most grotesque proportions not in the heat of a political or racial debate, but in the air-conditioned oblivion of a Macy’s or a Bloomingdale’s. For it is in such places where I am most lulled into thinking I’m really just like every other woman, and where I’m most distressed to discover that I’m not: Size 8 designer pants that look so possible on the hanger won’t accommodate my ample butt; frothy pastel tanks so pleasing to the eye wash out against my skin.

Which is why I always experience a certain relief when I happen upon an African goods store or street festival, because I know that the mud cloth and kente and copper jewelry and hip wraps will fit, in more ways than one. I’m American, sure, but African enough to feel more than a little connected to the stuff of the motherland, African enough to know that I’ll never risk looking ridiculous or blasphemous in a beaded collar and ankh earrings the way that a white woman, however good she may look in a size 8, certainly might. The whole aesthetic provides a rare psychological refuge from the drumbeats of pop culture, even a sense of superiority--I can go where not everyone can follow, settle into a context not everyone has.

And I get to do it with virtually no fear of imitation: Africa is not the place where fashion tends to take its cues. Unlike South Asia or South America, the continent does not lend itself to gaiety, whimsy or any cool ethno-religious iconography--smiling buddhas, godlike snakes--that would be suitable for silk-screening on T-shirts or hanging on neck chains. In the minds of many, Africa remains the dark and forbidden continent, an image intensified by the current crises of AIDS, civil wars and general post-colonial syndrome. Zebra and leopard prints and the perennial safari jacket notwithstanding, conventional fashion wisdom has been to steer clear of Africa and leave it to Africans across the world to interpret and to seriously wear--a right that I happily reserve, and judiciously exercise, here in my corner of the diaspora.

But that tacit agreement has been upended by the spring 2005 collections, which have embraced Africa with an enthusiasm I’ve not seen before. In two months of shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris, the runways featured a fearless presence not just of neo-safari wear, but of all the bold African details from which ready-to-wear tends to shrink: cowrie shells, beadwork, batik prints, kente and mud cloth, gold accents, head wraps, bangles, caftans. From Valentino to Dolce & Gabbana to Gucci, from veterans such as Diane von Furstenberg to wunderkind Zac Posen, designers sent models--blond, black and everything else--down the catwalks looking like only slightly westernized versions of Masai women from East Africa, or Mali women from the West. Costume National and Eley Kishimoto made perhaps the most dramatic statements, with liberal use of all of the above, as well as a dizzying mix of patterns that echoed authentic African ensembles almost in total.

The overall effect of the collections was strong, sensual and not a little unsettling. Here was my private closet being raided before my eyes, my one advantage in the fashion realm being broken down into pieces--dazzling pieces, to be sure--and handed out all around like goody bags. The most galling thing was that the nonblack models actually looked good in the clothes, if a little out of place or overwhelmed. (I took a bit of smug satisfaction in seeing some of those bright colors and graphic designs washing them out; call it my Macy’s revenge.) But the collective power of so much Africana displayed on a world stage was undeniable. I just couldn’t decide if I was proud or despairing--was this timely veneration or more expert white appropriation of something black? A homage to African culture and an acknowledgment that it is too often ignored, or exploitation of its best but least-worn elements to shake up a fashion scene stifled for several seasons by distinctly European brooches and tweeds? It was both, of course, so I wound up harboring both feelings. I may no longer have an exclusive right to African dress that I never had to begin with, but as an African American, I still have a lock on ambiguity.

Fashion designers and the fashion world at large do not wrestle with such questions of provenance, at least not publicly. It’s bad for business. After all, fashion is much more about escape than it is about confrontation, and if the political climate these days is any indication, we’re much more in the mood for the former. Yet the mere choice of an African motif this year, given the unresolved ugliness in Darfur, Sudan, and elsewhere, is heartening all by itself, a significant statement even if it does turn out to be superficial or short-lived. (In these dire times I’ll take a brief statement over none at all.)

The fashion business seems to be resisting the significance of its own position, though. Magazines are calling the spring 2005 looks globe-spanning, post-hippie chic, vacation chic and boho luxe--not untrue, but not quite reflective of the African spirit permeating the goods in their own pages. Harper’s Bazaar did praise Proenza Schouler’s debut line of fabric, bead and gold accessories as “Africa-inspired,” though it described the printed head scarves as “retro turban-style.” Big wooden bangles, noted on another page as a must-have accessory of the season, were more ungraciously described as “tribal.” (For its part, InStyle blithely advised readers on how to adapt the “tribal chic” look for themselves.)

If language shied away from the truth, however, images did not, and neither did some of the designers themselves. Diane von Furstenberg says the grand finale of her runway presentation, titled “The Grand Tour,” was Africa-themed--Serengeti caftans, Zimbabwe leaf-print gowns--for a reason. “Africa is very much in the air right now,” she says. “This collection really celebrates the woman traveler, the adventurer with curiosity and an open mind, and Africa is very much a part of that.” Though initially inspired by Ava Gardner’s impossibly glamorous getups in the 1953 jungle-themed movie “Mogambo” (“She was sitting on top of her suitcase, looking drop-dead!”), Von Furstenberg says she had a revelation recently during a visit to Botswana and Rwanda. It was the famously jet-setting designer’s first trip to the continent. “Africa is something you very much feel,” she says. “It’s the most beautiful place. You go there and realize that it’s very much the center of the Earth, that we all come from there. It has a certain grandeur and grandiosity that’s hard to describe.”

Other designers echo Von Furstenberg’s enthusiasm, though at points it is hard to parse the difference between enthusing and patronizing, between being plugged in and being entirely clueless about how all of those wonderful looks might be connected to actual people and their various states of peril. Costume National designer Ennio Capasa glibly describes creating a “tribal style,” but also says that “Africa means roots and nature, and this is what the world needs now, to discover again ancient values and tradition.” Zac Posen calls his new look “preppy tribal,” a bizarre but logical development in the history of preppy being paired with just about everything, but also says that “the exuberant color palette and wildly sexy prints convey life and vivacity,” which rather discomfitingly revives old Dark Continent notions about Africa being the root of all primal energy and not much else.

The Eley Kishimoto collection has a title and theme nearly the opposite of Von Furstenberg’s--”Local”--but the looks are no less adventurous, and considerably more African overall. That’s because husband and wife print designers Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto tapped the Afro-Caribbean aesthetic of their own London neighborhood for their controlling theme. “Where we live, where our studio is and the culture that is around it--it’s about . . . African overtones,” Eley says in an e-mail. “It is the local culture and color of Brixton . . . that has inspired our new collection.” Adds Kishimoto: “We wanted to have the impact of lots of prints mixed together that somehow creates some interesting looks--like the ladies we see in the street, with homemade decorated hats. . . . Such looks, you can’t imagine where a person who is wearing that would be going. . . . We are trying to dispel the idea that you have to dress in a certain way to go to a certain place.”

That, of course, is part of the beauty of African dress--that it goes anywhere, anytime, with anything. People who habitually wear mud cloth or kente or caftans wear them day and evening, to work and on special occasions, modifying shoes and jewelry, perhaps, but little else. African dress is at once impervious to fashion and the soul of fashion in its most perfect state: functional yet free, simple yet multidimensional, constant yet endlessly intriguing because it doesn’t change. And despite making rare official appearances on the runway, the African appeal is hardly new in fashion.

Constance C.R. White, the style director of EBay and the author of “StyleNoir,” a 1998 book about the history and impact of black fashion, notes that the last big Africa moment was in 1997, when mavericks Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano showed collections influenced in part by “Africa: The Art of a Continent,” a massive touring exhibit that had originated at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1995. She believes that most designers consistently use Africa as a creative touchstone, whether they admit it or not. “As a WASP and someone who grew up in WASP culture, one of the reasons I had to leave America was to develop as a designer,” reads one “StyleNoir” quote from Tom Ford, who helped define the ‘90s as creative director at Gucci. “Every designer I know has books on Africa. I have about 20.”

White applauds such frankness but wrestles with her own uneasiness about the veneration/exploitation question, mostly because the vast majority of people controlling runway looks and reaping the profits--designers, fashion conglomerates, magazine publishers--are not black or African, and never have been. A friend rudely reminded me of this fact when she showed me a photo spread on the spring collections that ran in the L.A. Times, then juxtaposed it with a photograph of Sudanese refugees from war-torn Darfur that appeared in the paper the following day. The sartorial similarities between white, willowy Zac Posen models strutting in four-figure dresses and the dark-skinned African women wearily making their way across a grassy field were improbable but unmistakable: bright fabrics in the same clear azure blues and sea greens, graphic patterns wrapped around the body in easy but bold counterpoint to one another. Depending on your point of view, this is either a shining moment for multiculturalism or the clearest evidence of its callousness.

If clothes don’t have the power to instigate change, they can at least herald it--not simply in hem lengths and silhouettes but in political movements and social attitudes. Nowhere is this truer than in black American fashion, itself a direct spiritual descendant of African fashion and, beginning with the Jazz Age and running through to hip-hop, the most consistent influence in fashion around the globe today. It is blacks who have made irreverent style--big hair, beads, braids, big hats, electric colors--de rigueur American style, blacks who have transformed snoozy blueblood labels such as Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren into purveyors of hip. Sean John, the clothing line of hip-hop artist and impresario Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, has come to define a late ‘90s/early aughts look I call outre casual, and it’s no coincidence that Combs has become ascending star Zac Posen’s most high-profile investor.

But the colonial dynamic at work in the fashion industry is the same for African Americans as it is for Africans, who in many ways are extensions and echoes of each other. The culture is freely appropriated; on this side of the Atlantic, black fashion is now viewed almost entirely through the prism of pop music, and therefore called “street,” “urban” or “hip-hop,” and it sells briskly not only here but everywhere, including Africa. Several years ago, I was startled to see some photos of young rebel fighters in Sierra Leone whose muse, etched on a concrete wall behind them, was not a national or local hero but slain rapper Tupac Shakur.

Though I have some issues with hip-hop, I’m also encouraged by it; its pervasiveness and global reach may be just the thing that’s opening the door back into Africa, at least within fashion. Whether that means Africa will gain the status granted to select aspects of its culture is a question that the black population here has actually been asking itself, and the rest of America, for generations. The answer is complicated and varies from one historical period to another. In these racially cynical times I’m inclined to buy the premise of “virtual integration,” which describes the conflicted phenomena of an increasing black media presence and a decreasing black political power--a deceptive modern-day version of the ideal that Martin Luther King Jr. once dreamed about, but has yet to be realized in its fullest sense.

I know it’s unfair to lay society’s problems at the feet of fashion; the most we can realistically expect it to do is evidence a symptom, not offer a solution. As for us consumers and inveterate Macy’s shoppers, perhaps the most profound thing we can do is assume that we are what we wear. Before you put on those ankh earrings or adorn your rib cage with a Masai-inspired beaded corset, before you splurge on any of Costume National or Eley Kishimoto’s fabulous prints or some version thereof, stop a moment to think about what makes them fabulous. I have plenty of theories as to why everyone has unilaterally decided that Africa is so hot right now, though the reason is ultimately anyone’s guess. Diane von Furstenberg says that’s the way things are supposed to be. “That’s the core appeal of fashion, that everybody gets the idea to do the same thing at the same time without really knowing why,” she remarks. “Without that mystery, there is no fashion.”

True, though as we head into spring with Africa squarely in the limelight, I feel somewhat demystified against my will. My one comfort is the fashion truism that the same piece of clothing on two different women often reads as two entirely different things. Being two different things to begin with--African American--this might be a choice opportunity to distinguish myself even more, not less. Whatever unresolved feelings I have about Africa, about its effects on my personal style and in my life generally, will be forced from the depths of a great historical unconscious to a glossy surface they never quite had to break.