Drawing by Walter Oltman
Boundaries between costume, fashion and fine art are today indistinguishable. I illustrate various examples across the spectrum, and suggest that perhaps fabric is the next fine art frontier to be crossed.
Consider how in the diaspora, African artists’ souls unravelled from the spool of their origins and colonized Fine art territory in ways previously unexplored. El Anatsui took textiles off the loom and created alchemy from the banal in ways defying categorization. His monumental draperies of metallic rhythm and colour are shards of serpentine beauty.
Swathed, some textiles become sculpture. South African artist Walter Oltmann uses woven wire, to re-assess meanings invested in covering. Taking impetus from the animal kingdom with infinite patience and detail, he changes costume into carapace.
Sculpture by Walter Oltman
New York designer Nick Cave a performance artist, draws inspiration from West African masquerade costumes, to re-invent theatrical coverings called soundsuits combining music and textile in an exhibition of the bizarre. These visceral creations effectively puncture layers of the urban subconscious, and invest them with myth and legends.
But costume in rural areas can also be sublime: Women from the Zwelimbowo region in Kwa-Zulu Natal draw humbly on personal history, symbolism and imagination to curate with care the costumes they wear on ceremonial occasions. Often worn only once, materials are sometimes organic and fragile, assembled in an impermanent way, with safety pins taking on a spiky appearance, transforming the subject into something fantastical, but visually armoured, altering the feminine into the superhero, in events viewed only by neighbours and passers-by.
Fine artist Mary Sibanda uses yards of voluminous cloth and Victorian tailored bustles to construct garments in juxtaposing tableaux that uncomfortably comment on the fractured skull of the colonial past. She photographs and records herself as subject imbued with the constrained experiences of generations of domestic workers.
Photographic Images like these, have replaced the sculpture and fine art and a cell phone screen is the new canvas. As a precursor to the selfies popularity, visionaries like Ike’ Ude’ depicts himself dressed, in what is the ultimate slap in the face of current politically correctness.“ I levelLed the field, combining the so-called exotic with the so-called civilized, disobeying rules of geography and time, playing with codes and signifiers’ of clothing beyond what we know as fashion”. This later-day Warhol, or self-styled sartorial anarchist dissects and reframes social comment with ease, inverting time and garment history by turning humans from grubs into Gods, indelibly changing the mirror image we see ourselves in.
Ike Ude
Enlarging on the multiple facets of digital media, Namsa Leuba, is a young Swiss based photographer and stylist, using costume/ fashion to reconnoiter African culture through the lens of a Western perspective making harsh contrasts of concept and colour more digestible, with rich layering.
But discussing costume in Africa is extraneous, without paring away at the meaning of fabric, the complex notions of what it is, means and conveys. Well before selfies, the relevance of fabric worn in the market place and how wearer is both actor and producer of content, was an established idiom.
Even a scrap of the most commercial cotton is imbued with conceptual references to time and place. This particular piece, acquired in Ivory Coast, 1990 depicting the computer, acclaims a new digital age and urban confidence in the machine.
Cotton fabric from Abidjan
A local example of proverbial references or “nesting within cloth”, would be the red, white and black fabric depicting animals worn wrapped by traditional healers, in South Africa to advertise their profession. It is believed to invest them spiritually with their ancestors’ direction at the same time generating their unique identities, within the realm of their calling.
Some Europeans postulate that Africans regard fabric as akin to the way Westerners view monuments. Heroes besides being venerated on a plinth, are also recalled by personality and whim. So, the cut and swirl of fabric design in the ubiquitous Madiba shirts became emulated as both fashion and costume and a way for the common herd to show affiliation. But political sentiment is palpable and fickle. As beloved as these garments were, repellent were those instantly recognizable from the mug- shot image and design, as Mugabes’ shirts worn to drum up political support during electioneering.
Then there are those iconoclasts, like Mcqueen who overturn heroes, history and everything we thought fashion was to redefine garments as something beyond the realm of possibility, stretching not only our imaginations but feet into new forms of encasement.
Alligator skin, python leather, fur and their verisimilitudes flop in and out of fashion and fine art, depending on the vagaries of animal rights groups, the economy and current trends. Notions of outsourcing fashion to China are provocative, consigning this industry to the meagre bottom line of thread count, colour and cost, views swiftly unpicked and endorsed by the press, with allegations of slavery and sweatshops.
For the contemporary designer an exceptional cut is no longer enough to promote a garment as being relevant. Fashion today embraces an aesthetic of conscience. It acknowledges the politically displaced through combining disparate elements, styles and fabric into one. Stella Jean a little known designer from Haiti, has consistently inserted her blend of African print fabric, mixed with sweatshirts and the unthinkable trends of homeless people, into an aesthetic promoted by the cognoscenti of Milan. Thereby through clothing she draws attention to social comment, the effects of climate change, or the Syrian refugee crises, and so reaffirms cloths content as a conceptual vehicle and empathy as a commodity.
Through sheer visual genius in several fields, fine art and costume dovetails with fashion. It takes mavericks and visionaries to constantly nudge, inspire and astonish us and the larger question might be on how curation is vital to promote ideas that like Icarus, float closer to the clouds.
Tastemakers, editors and photographers with a unique flair like Jean Paul Goude and his images of Grace Jones or Phyllis Galembo and her images of Africa and the Caribbean, facilitate the timing of what we perceive as beautiful, in new ways. Interpreting any new exhibition or show would always be to lead the insatiably curious on a journey, conceptual or otherwise, of invention, wonder and joy.
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