Beyond Listening: Systemic Transformation in Fashion Studies and Fashion Collections

Abstract

In their First Word essay, “Listening as a Radical Act,” Erica de Greef, Shayna Goncalves, and Angela Jansen (2021) argue for the importance of listening as a means to overcome our legacies of colonization. Without listening, it is too easy to assume that “fashion” is inherently capitalist and modern, created by genius designers (artists) in Western fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York) and that everything else is just a pale imitation. The way I have stated this might seem like an exaggeration—surely it can't be that bad in fashion studies—but as the authors have pointed out from their own diverse perspectives, it really is that bad. Too many people have experienced the study and curation of fashion as a devaluing gauntlet.The first book I can think of that explicitly questioned the colonial underpinnings of fashion studies, Re-Orienting Fashion (2003), was published less than two decades ago. In 2016, the book's primary coeditor and member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF), Sandra Niessen, reappraised the state of the discipline:As a historian of fashion, dress, and the body with expertise on African dress and fashion (Akou 2011), contemporary Islamic fashion, and working-class histories of dress in the United States, I agree with Niessen: We have made some progress, but fashion studies as a discipline has hardly been transformed. This is disheartening, especially when I think about the cultural importance and tremendous creativity of sartorial expression in many African and African diaspora cultures. As a graduate student, I never had to justify the value of studying African fashion because my advisor was Joanne Eicher (2022). Most beginning scholars are not that lucky.Listening is critical for decolonizing fashion studies, but it is not enough. Like art history, the study of fashion is about material culture; it cannot be fully understood through images alone. Fashion studies is also about people and places that support fashion practices— photographers, bloggers, designers, makers, fashion magazines, models, retail stores, etc…. Scholars can (and do) study contemporary practices, but what about the histories behind them? How do we know that African fashion changes? What is happening now that is different from ten or fifty years ago? As explored in Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices (McGregor, Akou, and Stylianou 2022), one of the reasons that fashion studies is so mired in Eurocentrism is because fashion collections in museums so rarely include examples of fashion from Africa or from other non-Western cultures. Instead, traces are scattered in other kinds of collections—categorized as art, trade goods, and “ethnographic” artifacts. For example, in my own study on the history of Somali dress, I did not find a single artifact in a fashion collection; everything was held by museums of art and natural history. Similarly, collections of African art in museums often include elements of dress such as textiles, jewelry, and masks, but rarely do curators attempt to include contemporary fashion or to represent individual fashion designers in their permanent collections.Transforming museums—whether by pulling these traces of fashion histories back together or by making fashion collections more inclusive—will not be easy. It is not easy for museums in Europe and North America to build trust among potential donors in Africa and the African diaspora, especially when so few curators are people of color. It is not easy for museums (anywhere) to justify their budgets when governments and nonprofit organizations have so many other pressing needs to address. Wealthy funders can have interests that are sharply different from scholars and museum visitors; sometimes they resist the most basic reforms.Just like African scholars and makers of fashion deserve to be heard, African fashion deserves to be seen in museums. True, systemic transformation of fashion studies and fashion collections will be a tremendous challenge. Listening is essential, but change is going to be limited until we change how we curate and access collections.