The Africa Fashion Exhibition will take place at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through this exhibition, visitors can explore Africa’s independence and creativity, while challenging decades of false assumptions. Influential designers will tell the continent’s story through their work, highlighting the unique creativity, ingenuity, and global impact of African fashion. In addition, the exhibition will display garments, textiles, photographs, sketches, and more, and it will feature personal insights from leading African fashion designers and creatives.
Celebrating African Creativity and Culture
The exhibition presents African fashion as a self-defining art form that reveals the richness and diversity of African histories and cultures. People have often misunderstood the continent, assuming that Africa cannot produce innovative and creative design. Colonialism and political upheavals have contributed to the stereotype that the continent relies on charity.
Showcasing the Full Ecosystem of African Fashion
Visitors will gain insight into ground-breaking designers, collectives, stylists, and fashion photographers working in Africa today. The exhibition highlights models, makeup artists, photographers, and illustrators, bringing together the full ecosystem behind the designs. By showcasing these diverse voices, the exhibition allows African fashion to tell authentic stories.
Furthermore, many garments on display come from renowned designers such as Shade Thomas-Fahm, Chris Seydou, Kofi Ansah, and Alphadi.
The Africa fashion exhibition will be organised into sections:
Politics and poetics of cloth
In this section we will learn about how important the use of Africa fashion cloth is in many different African countries and the way in which the making and wearing of indigenous cloths in the movement of independence became a political act.
Capturing change
The section titled capturing change will focus on photographic portraits of the mid-late 20th century. With each shot documenting the modernity and cosmopolitanism of individuals. Including studio photography from Sanlé Sory, Michel Papami Kameni and Rachidi Bissiriou.
Mezzanine
Will celebrate a new generation of designers, collectives, stylists and fashion photographers in efforts to bring about stories about the richness and diversity of African creativity, cultures and history using fashion.
The Africa fashion exhibition runs from 2nd July to 16th April 2023
