How fashion shaped Black diasporic cultures

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When Beyoncé Knowles-Carter released her album Cowboy Carter in March, she made a public claim on Black Americans’ cultural affiliation with country music. The drop was accompanied by a wealth of high fashion Western looks including a black fringed leather jacket by Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain and longtime Beyoncé collaborator. Rousteing, also well-versed in Black cowboy aesthetics and its history, contributed costumes to the 2021 Netflix Black Western The Harder They Fall and designed an accompanying capsule collection for Balmain.

Two Rousteing outfits feature in Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which I curated. His designs draw a line between a Black French designer who grew up watching whitewashed Westerns in Bordeaux and the history that about a quarter of 19th-century US cowboys were Black, many remaking their post-emancipation lives. Rousteing’s looks incorporate history, fashion and Black cross-cultural dialogues and encompass the exhibition’s leading questions: What is Black culture and what does fashion have to say about it?

If we consider the entire Black African diaspora — Black people who identify their origins to the African continent — the idea of Black culture stretches to encompass countless combinations of languages, ethnicities, religions and nationalities. Some might feel that any idea of unifying Black culture is implausible.

And yet, 19th and 20th century thinkers from American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois to Jamaican Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah and Jamaica-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, have continually encouraged the idea that international Black cultural networks are created and maintained across these distances and differences. As Black people, we share aspects of our cultures, underpinned by common experiences, most notably racial discrimination and oppression.

But this does not define Black culture. Africa’s Fashion Diaspora aims to tackle the dynamics of international Black networks of cultural exchange from the point of view of fashion designers who draw from multiple Black cultures.

One section is called “A Black Atlantic” — a reference to British sociologist Paul Gilroy’s influential 1993 book about Black cultural exchanges between the US and Europe. Rousteing’s designs, along with others, seek in this section to recontextualise the Atlantic Ocean as a historic contact zone, driven largely by the slave trade and connecting Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the US. These designers draw connections between distinct cultures.

South African textile designer Sindiso Khumalo, for example, works to empower Black women. A cotton dress from her SS21 range pays homage to Harriet Tubman — a once-enslaved woman who became an abolitionist — using prints of plants to mark the transition from enslavement to freedom. New York-based Aurora James supports African artisans and communities: she makes shoes and bags on the continent from sustainable materials.

The young New York-based Ghanaian designer Papa Oppong uses fashion design to speak to history, heritage and culture. His “Witchcraft” ensemble protests the practice of persecuting elderly Ghanaian women for witchcraft.

Africa’s Fashion Diaspora also examines the role of textile traditions in modern fashion. Its themes are not unique to Black people, yet each design embraces a specific Black perspective, distinctive to the experiences of its creator, but also expansive in the ways it reaches out to commune with other Black cultures. Among the designers are Europeans and Americans such as Grace Wales Bonner, Tracy Reese, Tremaine Emory and Telfar Clemens, as well as Africans such as Pathé’O (Côte d’Ivoire), Christie Brown (Ghana) and Lisa Folawiyo (Nigeria), all well recognised in their own countries, plus a number of emerging talents.

The mix is intentional. Africa’s Fashion Diaspora does not attempt to erase the tensions that exist within and across Black communities or the global fashion hierarchy. It instead draws new attention to an old conversation on Black unity, showing how fashion designers are imagining modern Black global citizens. 

Elizabeth Way is associate curator at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. ‘Africa’s Fashion Diaspora’ runs September 18–December 29