Christine Checinska, lead curator of the “Africa Fashion” exhibition currently on display at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, is also the senior curator for African and African Diaspora Fashion and Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Is it limiting to speak of “African fashion”?
The title of the exhibition is “Africa Fashion,” not “African fashion,” because we wanted to subtly mark the fact that African fashions can look like many different things, and we could never showcase fashions from across the entire continent. All we hoped to do was to give a glimpse. We took almost the corners of the continent: We had designs from Morocco to South Africa, from Ghana to Eswatini, to try and blur those old colonial boundaries. But also, again, to keep emphasizing that this is a complex topic. [African fashion is] multifarious, it’s rich, it’s inspiring, all of those things. And it’s something that cannot be defined.
How did you approach such a rich topic?
As someone who worked in the British fashion industry, who has African heritage via the Caribbean, and as someone with a PhD in cultural studies that looked at colonial history, post-colonial studies and so on, I felt that the only way we could begin this was in the era of independence. [This era] coincides with the rise of the Renaissance but also the professionalisation of the fashion industry. These are the key messages I’m trying to share: This idea of agency, unbounded creativity and abundance, pushing against stereotypical views.
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