NEW AFRICAN FASHION NAF_180411.indb 1 10.08.11 14:05 2 HELEN JENNINGS NEW AFRICAN FASHION NAF_180411.indb 2 10.08.11 14:05 Introduction PRESTEL Munich • London • New York 3 NAF_180411.indb 3 10.08.11 14:05 CONTENTS NAF_180411.indb 4 10.08.11 14:05 FOREWORD by Iké Udé 6 FACES 172 Kinée Diouf Super Model 174 INTRODUCTION 8 Alek Wek Model Citizen 178 Under cover Agents Candice Swanepoel, Behati Prinsloo and Heidi Verster 182 Armando Cabral Sole Man 184 FASHION 18 Flaviana Matata Class Act 188 Duro Olowu Prints Charming 20 Nana Keita Bamako Beauty 190 Xuly Bët Recycling Pioneer 26 The Harlem Boys Ger Duany, Salieu Jalloh Mimi Plange Afro-disiac 30 and Sy Allasane 192 Casely-Hayford Two of a Kind 32 Faces of Africa Oluchi Onweagba, FAFA Destination Nairobi 38 Kate Tachie-Menson and Lukundo Nalungwe 196 Gloria Wavamunno Loud Speaker 42 David Agbodji Man About Town 200 Amine Bendriouich Medina Maverick 44 Georgie Baddiel Ouagadougou Girl 202 Maki Oh The Thinker 46 Ty Ogunkoya Bright Eyes 206 Eric Raisina Spiritual Explorer 52 Ataui Deng & Ajak Deng Fabulous Two 208 Omer Asim & Maya Antoun Great Minds 56 Ozwald Boateng Bespoke Couturier 58 Mataano Sisters in Style 64 ART 212 Lanre Da Silva Ajayi Silver Siren 68 Karl-Edwin Guerre Fine Dandy 214 Black Coffee Bastion of Bauhaus 70 Hassan Hajjaj Arabian Knight 220 Momo Renaissance Woman 76 Chris Saunders Happy Snapper 226 Bunmi Koko Power Couple 80 Nkwo Bird of Paradise 82 Stiaan Louw (Un)traditionalist 84 Loin Cloth & Ashes Daydreamer 90 GLOSSARY Tsemaye Binitie Glamazon 94 Tiffany Amber Cruise Controller 96 & FURTHER READING 234 Buki Akib Quintessential Nigerian 102 Bridget Awosika City Slicker 106 INDEX 236 Accessories Alex Folzi, Kwame Brako, Anita Quansah, Albertus Swanepoel, Free Peoples Rebellion 108 CONTACTS 238 David Tlale Hot Ticket 114 Ré Bahia Mummy’s Girl 118 PICTURES CREDITS 239 Jewel by Lisa Star Bright 120 Emeka Alams Slave to the Rhythm 126 Suzaan Heyns Fashion’s Frankenstein 130 Deola Sagoe Queen Bee 132 A. Sauvage Costumier 138 Thula Sindi Straight Talker 142 LaLesso Beach Babes 144 Ituen Basi Las Gidi Londoner 146 Samantha Cole London Goddess of Darkness 152 Heni New Romantic 156 Bestow Elan Karma Chameleon 158 Angelo Van Mol Antwerp One 160 Christie Brown Lady Grace 164 Pierre-Antoine Vettorello Firestarter 166 KLûK CGDT Best Men 168 NAF_180411.indb 5 10.08.11 14:05 6 by Iké Udé FOREWORD NAF_180411.indb 6 10.08.11 14:05 In 1907 the storied, iconic oracle of iridescent effects, while fastidiously modern art, Pablo Diego José Francisco indulging his Ashanti/Ghanaian de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de disposition for bold, marvellous colours los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima in the lining of the jackets. Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, simply known Amaka Osakwe of Maki Oh is quite as Picasso, had an ‘African moment’. the darling and inventive maverick. It was his very fi rst encounter with There is in her work a clear gift of African art. The sublimely grotesque craftsmanship, sympathy for African masks, nail-studded fetishes, scar- sartorial classics, the impishness of cheeked idols and distorted/disfi gured the coquette, the insouciance of Fela’s human representations he saw were ‘Shakara’ and a wonderfully infectious like nothing he’d ever witnessed or ‘girls-just-wanna-have-fun attitude’. learned about in Europe or the East. Thanks to Maki Oh, African girls, and This shocking encounter arrested his increasingly their counterparts abroad, imagination. Soon after, he began are having such fun wearing her clothes. and fi nished work on Les Demoiselles Lawyer turned designer Duro d’Avignon. This masterpiece marked Olowu’s prodigious, promiscuous a paradigm shift, a tabula rasa for a appetite for and command of patterns radically new kind of modernism with and colours fondly echoes Henri Matisse, an African foundation! a Picasso contemporary who had his In fashion, a bevy of designers from ‘African moment’, too. Yves Saint Laurent, Junya Watanabe, The idiosyncratic, charming Adrien Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs and John Sauvage is perhaps one of the wittiest Galliano to Alexander McQueen, designers working now, and surely a Comme des Garçons and Jean Paul beacon of hope for loads of men who Gaultier have all quoted African art in are sartorially challenged. part or in toto. Evidently, African art To be sure, the general Cubistic or African fashion is not new – quite approach and detail-obsessed the contrary. What is relatively new on construction evident in the work of the global stage are African artists and South Africa’s Black Coffee label, fashion designers deservedly operating designed by Jacques van der Watt, with a creative autonomy that has not winningly quotes Picasso’s African been seen before. period with piquant poeticisms. It was in 1907, Picasso admitted to the Enter the new or not-so-new African venerable French writer André Malraux, designers: that he was so utterly stunned by his encounter with African art that he kept Xuly Bët by Lamine Badian Kouyaté repeating the words ‘shock’, ‘revelation’, came to public attention in the early ’force’ and ‘charge’. Collectively, the 1990s and shook the fashion world with varied superb talents of designers his seemingly Dada/punk attitude that, ranging from the veterans Joe Casely- as it turned out, was culturally astute, Hayford and Eric Raisina to new talents economically informed and a seminal Gloria Wavamunno, Mataano, Pierre- fashion moment. Xuly Bët’s genius Antoine Vettorello and Stiaan Louw Iké Udé was born in Nigeria and moved wasn’t just that he recycled second- are all by various degrees inevitably to the US in the 1980s. He lives and hands but that, like an excellent artist, holding sway on a global scale – for works in New York City. His artwork he transformed what he found – one good. Consequently, as happened to is in the permanent collections of of the core lessons that Picasso learned Picasso aeons ago, the fashion world is the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, from African art – to transform rather increasingly having its ‘African moment’ New York, the Smithsonian National than transcribe. in this new millennium. Museum, Washington DC, and numerous The princely arbiter elegantiarum Helen Jennings’s book, New African private collections. Udé is the founder Ozwald Boateng is well noted to have Fashion – a fi rst of its kind – frames and publisher of aRUDE magazine, a alighted on Savile Row and peeled this momentous, fl owering movement quarterly devoted to art, culture, style several layers of stodginess off the beautifully and prefi gures that and fashion. He is the author of Style File: traditional home of bespoke tailoring. inevitability, the ‘African moment’. Hers The World’s Most Elegantly Dressed, With an aesthete’s eye for suppleness is an immeasurably overdue, much- a comprehensive monograph recently Foreword of syntax, he infused his fi tted suits, by needed book and utterly to the point! To released by HarperCollins. A style icon, he turns, with whispery hues or shades all these protean, magnifi cently inspired was selected as one of Vanity Fair’s 2009 of purple, green, red and at times with designers, I say chapeau and keep at it! International Best Dressed Originals. 7 NAF_180411.indb 7 10.08.11 14:05 8 Africa is fashion’s new frontier. Having Woman’s starch-resist been sidelined by mainstream fashion adire eleko wrapper cloth, c. 1960, Yoruba, for over half a century as little more Nigeria than a source of aesthetic inspiration, the continent’s home-grown industry is now showing the world how African fashion is really done. Today’s generation of talented designers and image-makers are riding the broader wave of interest in Africa’s renaissance and attracting an international clientele by balancing contemporary fashion’s pursuit of the new with an appreciation of the ideals of beauty and adornment that are deeply rooted in Africa’s cultural and social consciousness. This new guard, which includes labels and designers such as Lagos’s Jewel by Lisa, Johannesburg’s Black Coffee, Accra’s Christie Brown, London’s Duro Olowu and New York’s Mataano, is creating the most exciting and original chapter in fashion’s discourse since Japan emerged as a major player in the 1980s, and helping to give African style its moment in the sun. The history of fashion in Africa is one of constant exchange and appropriation, The earliest wearable African artefacts identity, method of communication and a complex though ill-documented originate from Egypt, Nigeria, Cameroon spiritual protection. Raffi a, bark, woven, journey with different infl uences coming and Sierra Leone, with some evidence wax-printed and tie and dye varieties into play across time and place. Contrary dating back to 2000 BC and beyond. The abound. Nigerian adire, for example, is to the accepted view of African traditions practice of draping a single uncut length a resist-dyed indigo cloth developed by as monolithic and unchanging, the of cloth around the body formed the Yoruba women in the 1800s. There are evolution of dress practices and sartorial foundation of African dress. Arabian and over 400 recognisable patterns, which acumen confi rms fashion’s role as a Berber trade routes helped spread loom- are either hand-painted or stencilled potent visual expression of a continent spun textile technologies across Africa onto the cloth before it is repeatedly in constant fl ux. African aesthetics have and from the 16th century onward, immersed in the seductively deep- travailed through empires, confl icts, European travellers documented the blue dye. Each symbol has an accepted slavery, migration, globalisation and changing tastes in fabrics, jewellery and meaning, giving a voice to the fabric urbanisation to cater to new contexts and other fi nery.