THE REDUCTIVE AESTHETICS OF ‘AFROPOLITAN’ FASHION

These past few days I have come across two (more) articles documenting the success of African fashion with Western customers, one by a niche publication, and another one by a major news platform. In both cases, ‘African dress’, a rich signifier encompassing a host of different practices and trends, is reduced to a very specific and limited typology of sartorial fashion, aimed predominantly at …