‘I’m not interested in rules, or whether they are there or not. I do not consciously set out to break rules. I only make clothes that I myself feel are beautiful or good-looking. People maybe say that this way of feeling is against the rules.’

Rei Kawakubo

OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH DRESS and fashion – as individuals and as a cultural collective – is guided by the necessary rules and edicts that reinforce what we should, or more importantly, should not, wear. These form like the repeated lines of opposing graphics in a print or pattern that carefully divide one visual element from another, separating positive and negative values in space. In this instalment to our collaborative series with Missla Libsekal of Another Africa, we look at the way graphics are visually arranged, divided and drawn over the body, balancing these tensions of form and colour to impose a two-dimensional pattern on the body.

Aesthetic codes of dress are omnipresent throughout fashion media and communication. From the point of sale, to the images and text of magazines and press, we are rigorously and consistently told ‘what to wear’ and ‘what not to wear’ with a decisiveness that filters into every aspect of clothing. Particular modes of dress are either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ binary opposites that form repeated patterns of behaviour in a network of rules weighted with consequence. Print and pattern in dress is itself an aesthetic dictated by such rules: how one should wear printed fabric, supposedly to avoid ‘clashing’ or ‘gaudiness’, is a familiar seasonal dialogue.

Rei Kawakubo’s statement that in designing she is ‘not interested in rules, or whether they are there or not’ is somewhat significant in this respect, but perhaps idealistic when looking at the output of Comme des Garçons. More often than not, the designer’s work is inextricably linked with the cultural and societal dictums of style that it is exposed to. In other words engaging with sartorial norms is unavoidable. Even so, it seems the further a designer places their work away from such codes, the more they are subject to comparison with them. The infamous, and affectionately titled ‘Lumps and Bumps’ collection did just this in its outlandish rejection of the ‘ideal’ figure. These notions weave through every aspect of the Comme des Garçons’ sensibility and we see a similar rejection of what is aesthetically pleasing in the graphics of the Comme des Garçons Shirt advertisement artwork by Tauba Auerbach, something that is frustrating to observe in its optical dynamic. Likewise, the accessories designer, Michelle Elie embodies these apparent tensions in her highly graphic ensemble at Paris Fashion Week, rejecting style commandments of balance and restraint. The Comme des Garçons outfit that she wears is layered to a clashing and noisy effect, going against how print is generally expected to be worn; that is, with balance and subtlety.

The Nigerian photographer J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s iconic images of the hairstyles of his native culture, show painstakingly crafted forms on the head. The graphic effect of creating positive and negative space with hair is a powerful stylistic example of the balance of print on the body. Not unlike the function of print, the surface of the skull is subject to the dividing characteristics of pattern. Similarly, the hennaed feet in the adjacent image by Malian photographer Alioune Bâ, ‘Djabi’, show a traditional and culturally symbolic technique that is used to created graphic boundaries on the body.

Throughout these images, there is a notion of balance through the use of pattern on the body: creating an equilibrium between positive and negative values. Herb Ritts’ photograph ‘El Mirage’ from 1990, captures the seductive power of this tension between spaces. Through shadow, the feminine curvature of the body is enhanced with the photographer’s signature stylistic execution. Next to this, Constance Stuart Larrabee’s black and white image of a boy under the shadows of mesh window frame, also reflects an application of print – albeit less stylistically that Ritts – to create form and balance on the natural landscape of the body.

Pattern and print could thus be a metaphor, or visual realisation of these omnipresent guidelines that reside over fashion and the way we dress from day to day. Both deal with necessary opposites in order to create balance (or lack of), trading in positive and negative values, from what we should or should not wear on our bodies, to the tensions created from opposing forms or hues on a colour wheel.

1. J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, ‘Untitled’, 2006
2. Alioune Bâ, ‘Djabi’, 1997. Courtesy of Opus Art
3. Valérie Belin, ‘Moroccan Brides (Untitled)’, 2000
4. Floor tiles at Palais Mokri, Fez, Morocco
5. Comme des Garçons Shirt artwork by Tauba Auerbach, 2008
6. Untitled (Ndebele woman), copyright Sam Haskins, from the book ‘African Image’
7. Odili Donald Odita, ‘Sister Midnight’, 2013
8. Moroccan zelig tiles, in Fez, Morocco
9. Constance Stuart Larrabee’s image of a young gold miner watching Sunday mine dance, Witwatersrand, near Johannesburg, 1948. Courtesy of the National Museum of African Art
10. Herb Ritts, ‘El Mirage’, 1990, showing the back view of a Versace dress
11. Malick Sidibé, ‘Les 2 Amies (Cousins)’, 1975
12. Michelle Elie wearing Comme des Garçons during Paris Fashion Week

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud.

Coco Chanel

THE BODY IS A realm of political, social and cultural negotiation; and as such, dress and adornment powerfully represent characteristics within these categories. Artist Barbara Kruger summarises this function eloquently on her 1989 poster, ‘Your body is a battleground’. As the body is crucial to our whole understanding of dress and fashion, it is both vulnerable and powerful as it is symbolically manipulated with clothing. In the third instalment in the collaborative series between Vestoj and Another Africa, we explore the lengths we go to in building meaning onto the body.

When Nelson Mandela wore a bathrobe and neckpiece to represent the traditional costume of his Thembu tribe to his trial after evading authorities as the ‘Black Pimpernel’, he was communicating a distinct message with the body, one of resilience and protest in the wake of his political persecution. Similarly to Mandela the politically symbolic Miriam Makeba often wore her hair in the traditional Fulani style, a sartorial presentation that was inextricably linked to her political identity and context. Considering examples such as these, Coco Chanel’s words, ‘The most courageous act is still to think for yourself aloud’ might speak of the act of externalisation, and of the materialisation of ideas and intent on the body. The politics of the body are also at play when we look at the reappropriation of menswear for women, and notions of androgyny, from Marlene Dietrich’s seminal presentation in tuxedo trousers in the 1930 film ‘Morocco’ that influenced the iconic Helmut Newton image of Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’, invoking the historical narrative of women wearing pants.

Notions of gender also come into play here: a realm in which the fluidity of dress becomes particularly powerful. In one image, a Woodabe man prepares for the Gerewol festival in Tahoua, Niger with extreme care; preening, dressing and applying make-up to impress members of the opposite sex in the ceremony, an age-old tradition of the region. In more contemporary phenomena, similar lengths might be taken by followers of high fashion, or the act of dressing to transgress gender.

Dressing the body is an act of covering nakedness – the fashioned figure’s opposition. In this sense, nakedness is a blank canvas, with no signifiers of social and cultural context, and from which the process of concealing (and sometimes revealing) occurs. In the words of Yves Saint Laurent, ‘Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime.’ or ‘The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves.’ Suggesting that the purest expression of the body is one without fashion, and its symbolic trappings, this expression sits in contrast to Newton’s image of ‘Le Smoking’.

A decade earlier, the sexually emancipated image of Grace Jones whose presentation of power balances masculine and feminine aesthetics with commercial success, has some strong visual and symbolic parallels with YSL’s ‘Le Smoking’. To the right, Samuel Fosso’s black and white photograph ‘Angela Davis’, from the 2008 series ‘African Spirits’, is an image that is straightforwardly ambiguous. In the tradition of self-portraiture of photographers like Cindy Sherman, Fosso dressed himself as key African and Black American political figures and images for the series. The styling of the portrait of himself as the Black Panther figure, political activist, intellectual and feminist Angela Davis, engages with notions of ownership – of an image and one’s appearance, and its political and gender-based signifiers and historical narratives of resistance.

Across all of these images, each presenting varying manipulations of dress and its manifestation on the body with differing connotations; the notion of the body, the surface upon which identity is formed, still holds true. Through this process of presentation, the intent of an individual is externalised on the surface of the body; but also we are able to take ownership and claim our body through these lengths.

 

1. Woodabe man of the Fulani ethnicity preparing for the Gerewol festival, Tahoua, Niger, photograph by Jean-Christophe Huet
2. Athi-Patra Ruga, ‘UnoZuko’, 2013. Courtesy of Whatiftheworld Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
3. Miriam Makeba wearing a Fulani hairstyle c.1970s
4. ‘Rien n’est plus beau qu’un corps nu. Le plus beau vêtement qui puisse habiller une femme, ce sont les bras de l’homme qu’elle aime. Mais pour celles qui n’ont pas eu la chance de trouver ce bonheur, je suis là.’ Yves Saint Laurent, 1983, translated as ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body. The most beautiful clothes that can dress a woman are the arms of the man she loves. But for those who have not had the chance to find happiness, I am there.’
5. Fashion designer Gabrielle Coco Chanel with Duke Laurino of Rome on the beach at the Lido, 1930, photographed by Gjon Mili
6. ‘Le Smoking’ by Yves Saint Laurent, photograph by Helmut Newton for Vogue Paris in 1975.
7. ‘Rive Gauche et Libre’ editorial for Vogue Paris, September 2010 featuring Josh Parkinson, photograph by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggot, with styling by Carine Roitfeld
8. Grace Jones in her ‘One Man Show’ in 1982, photograph by Adrian Boot
9. Nelson Mandela portrait wearing traditional beads and a bed spread, in hiding from authorities as the ‘black pimpernel’, 1961. Photograph by Eli Weinberg
10. Barbara Kruger, ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’, 1989
11. Samuel Fosso, ‘Angela Davis’ from the series ‘African Spirits’, 2008
12. Nástio Mosquito’s ‘Mulher Fósforo’, 2006. Courtesy of Sindika Dokolo Foundation
13. Edith Bouvier Beale in ‘Grey Gardens’, 1975

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

I first need to work on the fabric. I need to cut it, think about the shape, drape it on the bust ­– reflect on it.

Azzedine Alaïa 

IN THE SECOND INSTALMENT to our collaborative series ‘Sartorial Meditations’ with Another Africa, we look more closely at the various ways in which the continuity of fabric, and its endless potential, is cut into or interrupted by pattern and form.

From the exclusive realms of haute couture, to traditional systems of dress, there are processes that – although they sit as cultural polar opposites – share common themes. Cutting is a technique that creates form on the body; be it of the skin or fabric.

In the black and white photographic series ‘Omo’ by American photographer Drew Doggett we discover an image of a scarified bust depicting sculptural form on the body through the act of repetitive cutting as practiced by the Suri people in southern Ethiopia. The body’s surface is restructured in this process, likening it to the bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Classique’ perfume that sits beside it.

Images of traditional practices are objectified next to those of contemporary culture, dispersed in a broader context of fashion and dress. As such, it’s important to continuously re-frame the fashion image, to place one image against another playfully, and unexpectedly, to re-shuffle how we read images of fashion and the symbols of dress.

One of the failings of fashion theory and discourse is arguably that it insists on looking at the subject as a linear dialogue where one trend or cycle leads to another. Whereas, clothing could in fact be said to be a more dynamic phenomenon, constantly shifting and appropriating itself across time and place.

These images, deeply ingrained in our notion of dress, are also inextricably linked with geography in tracing a cultural narrative. For instance, when scarification and skin ornamentation, a traditional practice, is performed in a contemporary context, it has a renewed sense of spectacle and cultural connotations.

For a couturier, fabric might be viewed as an analogy of the skin, and as such, shaping and moulding material conjures up the possibilities of the body’s flexible membrane. The starkly stylised environments of Europe’s haute couture ateliers provide an extreme in this dynamic.

Azzedine Alaïa, widely known for his pattern cutting techniques and for skilfully sculpting the body through fabric, is perhaps the ultimate contemporary couturier. In contrast to many of his historical predecessors, his designs engage directly with the anatomy. What Alaïa and his contemporaries evoke is this crucial dynamic in dress – be it haute couture or ready-to-wear – as an alignment of the skin and the anatomy of the body in the act of wearing.

These notions of cutting as a sculptural art form that creates rhythm and form on the body, traverse fashion; whether it’s the tight beaded bodice of the Dinka men in South Sudan, the tattooed skin of a Japanese woman, the age-old traditions of scarification or the revered ‘cut’ of high fashion, evocative parallels abound.

To view fashion as a network of possibilities, connotations and connections that shift and percolate with different social conditions and factors, sets a precedent for this series which aligns some of the tensions within dress and its image.

Both high fashion and traditional systems share a technique and discipline that involves a rigorous process of repetition and discipline, but that ultimately celebrate the form and texture of the human body.

1. ‘Two Dinka Men with Corsets, South Sudan’, by Angela Fisher & Carol Beckwith C-print, 76 x 52cm
2. Azzedine Alaïa by Patrick Demarchelier, from Haute Couture spring/summer 2003
3. A model wears Edward Lee tattoo shirt, featuring Americana artwork printed onto flesh-coloured mesh
4. A Japanese tattoo artist works on a woman’s backside, photographer unknown
5. Scarification c.1943, photographer unknown
6. ‘Untitled 6’, from the series ‘Omo’, showing a Suri woman, by Drew Doggett
7. Tattoo print tulle dress by Jean Paul Gaultier, 2013
8. Jean Paul Gaultier poses with Madonna for French Glamour, June 1990, photograph by Herb Ritts
9. Yombe woman, Congo c.1947. Photo by H.A. Bernatzik
10. Amazigh tattoo pattern, Berber, Morocco
11. Jean Paul Gaultier’s ‘Classique’ fragrance
12. Azzedine Alaïa, ‘Powder Puff’ long sheath dress, spring/summer 1994, photograph by Paolo Roversi, 2013
13. ‘Untitled’, from the series ‘Omo’, showing a Suri warrior, by Drew Doggett

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.

Take your pleasure seriously.

Charles Eames

HOW WE UNDERSTAND FASHION is a collection of infinite possibilities, projected images and representations. At once enigmatic, desirable, glamorous, festive, authoritarian; dress is a multi-dimensional concept that might be described and observed a countless number of ways, from anthropological costume to the revered fashion image. More importantly perhaps, fashion occurs in many locations, and simultaneously across the globe. In effect, it does not follow the hierarchical template it aspires to, it instead should be read as a collective, global experience. Our understanding of dress is part of a galaxy of references across time and place: in 1937 Elsa Schiapparelli releases her ‘Shoe Hat’, an exercise in sartorial surrealism, while 4,500 kilometres away, a Nigerian man is photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt walking the street with a shoe atop his head, for reasons unknown. Both images are connected by fashion and but each is inscribed with a myriad of cultural, aesthetic, social characteristics that continue our complex and rich experience of clothing.

In a collaborative series, ‘Sartorial Meditations’, Another Africa‘s Missla Libsekal shares with Vestoj some of her notes on fashion; curating the aesthetic correlations that exist in dress and the fashion image, and reflecting on fashion’s transformative power across the globe. We begin the series with some notes on form, silhouette and its potential for absurdity in this first instalment: ‘In All Seriousness’.

Take the archetypal format of the shoe, both a sartorial adornment and an independent object in space. In shifting the placement from the foot to the head, Schiapparelli’s ‘Shoe Hat’ sought to break the conventions of form and function, this piece has been celebrated as a canonical ‘moment’ in fashion discourse. With similar surreal playfulness, a pair of shoes from the Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection, pokes fun at the act of covering the body, by illustrating the hypothetical toes within.

Fashion’s emphasis on ‘balance’ as a design directive and aesthetic value also comes into play here, for the 2013 retrospective of the shoe designer Roger Vivier at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the cover image of the balancing shoe was chosen. The graphic photograph (originally used in an advertising campaign for the brand) reminds us of the physicality of balance as a design principle within the functions of the object. After all, a good heel is an exercise in balance in itself. In keeping with this, Vivier explains his design process, ‘I’ll resketch my drawing five hundred times to check the exactness of the idea and respect the foot’s architecture.’

In contrast, the absurdity and exaggeration of the function of dress is also an aesthetic tool, perpetuating the oft-conceived notion that fashion is a frivolous exercise. A strong image of this is Naomi Campbell’s infamous tumble in walking the catwalk for the Vivienne Westwood spring/summer 1998 collection. The image has since become symbolic of hyperbolic fashion. This is a very physical notion of balance, and under similar principles, the Nigerian man rests his shoe atop his head, reminding us that fashion is, above all, a piece of clothing that can be placed around the body and throughout different contexts.

Fashion’s ability to transform itself and consistently evolve, derives from the notion of breaking codes. When looking at the changing silhouette of the fashioned body through the past, each moment of innovation is the product of defiance from convention, of pushing boundaries. Playing with these ideas forces us to reassess our collective cultural values time again. Warhol’s letter from the Museum of Modern Art in New York brings the notion of absurdity and breaking of convention sharply into focus. His proposal of a shoe as an art piece for the gallery is ridiculous and insightful, as Warhol seems to parody both the fashion and art world in his sartorial offering to the institution.

At times ridiculous, profound, dynamic, these connections and constellations that emerge in examining the form of clothing as ornament of the body, and the fashioned image, encourage a more playful and democratic interpretation of dress, echoing the simple words of Charles Eames, ‘Take your pleasure seriously’.

1. Naomi Campbell takes a tumble during the Vivienne Westwood autumn/winter 1993 catwalk presentation at Paris Fashion week
2. Cover image for the Roger Vivier retrospective exhibition, ‘Virgule, etc… Dans les pas de Roger Vivier’ at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris in 2013
3. Armando Cabral photographed by Richard Pier Petit, with styling by Carl Barnett
4. Hair by Olivier Schawalder for Vogue Pelle
5. ‘Nigerian Man Carrying a Shoe on His Head’ by Alfred Eisenstaedt, April 1953
6. An early example of a stiletto heel, from the International Footwear Museum of Vigevano, Italy c.1952
7. Elsa Schiaparelli, shoe hat 1937/1938 collection.
8. Delman Shoes at Bergdorf Goodman advertisement, designed by Reba Sochis of Sochis Advertising & Promotion, c.1960s
9. ‘Henna vs. Bamako, Mali’ by Glenna Gordon, 2013
10. The rejection letter to Andy Warhol from MoMA in 1956 of his gifted artwork entitled ‘Shoe’, the letter reads:Dear Mr. Warhol:Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled ‘Shoe’ which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.I regret that I must  report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently. Nevertheless, the Committee has asked me to pass on to you their thanks for your generous expression of interest in our Collection.Sincerely,Alfred H. Barr, JrDirector of the Museum Collections P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.
11. Shoes from Comme des Garçons autumn/winter 2009 collection

Missla Libsekal is the founding editor of Another Africa.