Curating Fashion as Decolonial Practice: Ndwalane’s Mblaselo and a Politics of Remembering

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the curatorial moment in a museum that rendered a pair of embellished trousers in a new light, and what acts of giving space to an object and its story can do to rewrite a range of narratives, including global fashion histories, diverse cultural voices, museal collections and the extent of ongoing archival violence. I draw on a seminal South African fashion exhibition that I curated in 2019 at the Zeitz MOCAA museum, titled 21 YEARS: Making Histories with South African Fashion Week. In conjunction with the exhibition, we convened workshops and talks as part of the exhibition’s public program that used decolonial strategies to invite greater diversity and participation for an expanded range of inclusion. This article follows the complex, largely disavowed social, historical, and political histories stored in the seams of one fashion object—a pair of well-worn and patched jeans—that are activated when recontextualized within the value-laden, knowledge-production museum field.