From Michelle Obama’s Jackie-O-inspired sheath dress to Cindy McCain’s red-state-colored leather jacket, fashionable attire often communicates more information about personal image and ambition than words.
Few cultures understand this coding better than those of Africa.
A Congo chieftain trims his 11-tiered, cylindrical hat in metal disks to convey his power and wealth. A Liberian teenager wears several strands of beads around her waist to indicate her impending womanhood. A Ghanaian man wraps his body in bright kente cloth to signify his national pride.
The beauty and inventiveness of these designs are celebrated in “TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art. This diverse array of 70 textiles and adornments, primarily 20th-century designs from the western and southern portions of the continent, focuses on traditional costumes and the ways in which they are being transformed through the introduction of modern materials.
It is almost too broad in its reach and, like many surveys of African artifacts, unsuccessfully tries to attach a coherent sensibility to vast regions within this multicultural continent.
Co-curators Bryna Freyer and Christine Mullen Kreamer have tried to gear the show to a younger audience by suggesting the signals sent by the clothing about taste and status are similar to cell-phone and computer messaging. The analogy is superficial - the designs’ communicative intent could be equally compared to old-fashioned semaphores - but fortunately it doesn’t interfere with the presentation of the textiles, which are mostly drawn from the museum’s collection.
For fashionistas, the show offers many creative ideas for their own wardrobes in garments sympathetic to contemporary trends. A Zulu pleated skirt, a raffia tube dress from the Ivory Coast and a Cameroonian tunic made of porcupine quills would look right at home on the runways of Paris.
Like many exhibits on fashion, this one is most enjoyable when the clothes and accessories are shown on mannequins so they can be seen as intended. Videos also supply documentation of how Africans wear some of the garb or did so in the past.
Most of the in-the-round displays are reserved for fantastic ceremonial costumes in a gallery as tall and open as a fashion designer’s loft.
One of the most fanciful was created for a female impersonator from Nigeria’s Igbo tribe. This patchwork bodysuit, complete with faux breasts and a wooden mask carved with an elaborate hairdo, completely covers a male dancer’s body so he appears as a young woman. One wonders how easily the performer moves around with his ankles covered in huge brass rings, which signify feminine prestige and exemption from physical labor.
Next to this masquerade is an equally concealing outfit made of raffia. The striped, fibrous leotard was made by the Pende peoples in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo for initiation rites, funerals and leadership festivities. It features a ski-mask-style head covering, a fringed skirt and wrist cuffs as big as a cheerleader’s pom-poms. Protruding from the eye openings are binocular-style glasses meant to suggest all-seeing powers.
The exhibit attempts to reveal the mutability of African fashion in a grouping of toga-style garments, but the fabrics are shown flat against the wall like curtains. No matter, since the most interesting part of these wrappers, made for both men and women, are their graphic patterns created through resist dyeing and strip weavings.
Traditional apparel is stressed throughout the show in tribal clothing once worn on a daily basis and now reserved for special occasions. The exhibit opens with hats decorated in fur, beads and cowrie shells, and a banana-leaf backskirt worn to cover a woman’s posterior. One of the more unusual designs is a hunter’s tunic adorned with a bell, animal horns and leather packets holding passages from the Koran to protect against dangerous predators.
With the import of materials from Europe and Asia during the 1900s, such native designs began to change. Plastic beads were substituted for coconut shells, velvet for lion skins, and glistening metallic threads for shiny, pounded indigo cloth.
Such luxury fabrics were commonly used to create ensembles worn to Nigeria’s Benin court. The exhibit includes a woman’s dress and stole sewn in sequined Indian sari cloth, known locally as “George,” and a playful design made in a synthetic fabric patterned with the Statue of Liberty and its stone pedestal.
Cheaper printed textiles began to be manufactured in Africa in the 1960s, but few examples are included in the show. Tucked into a hallway next to the gallery are two recent factory-printed remnants: a fabric patterned with cell phones, obviously chosen to fit with the text-messaging theme, and another created to mark President Bush’s February trip to Tanzania with his portrait interlaced with political slogans and crossed flags.
They appear as an afterthought to this exhibit, which raises more questions than it answers. Are these mid- and late-20th-century garments part of a dying tradition or are they still being made by the showcased cultures? How do they relate to what’s happening in African fashion today? This show about communication through design ultimately lacks a clear message.
WHEN YOU GO
WHAT: “TxtStyles/Fashioning Identity”
WHERE: 950 Independence Ave. SW
WHEN: through Dec. 25; 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily
ADMISSION: Free
PHONE: 202/633-1000
WEB SITE: www.africa.si.edu
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