Stylin’ cannot be separated from [its] cultural roots or, indeed, routes – Checinska The journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies dedicated an issue to male self-fashioning in Africa and the diaspora. Edited by Leora Farber, the issue features articles that span South Africa, the Caribbean, the US, and Britain, shedding light on the under-investigated topic of black male …

So I got back to doing my thing after a year of maternity leave. It’s been intense and I missed blogging, but at the same time I couldn’t bring myself to devoting the little free time I had to writing. But since I have more time on my hands now (things aren’t properly ‘busy’ at work, read: I lost my …

Brent Luvaas, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Drexel University, is an expert of streetstyling and streetwear culture. His volume Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging is forthcoming for Bloomsbury. As I wait to read this book, I go back to Luvaas’ other insightful writings on street culture, looking for cues to help me better flesh out my own research on African streetstylers – the Afrosartorialists. …

Here is the second part of my summary of NKA’s special issue on black fashion. I put a little commentary at the bottom. *** Bill Gaskins’ interview with Anthony Barboza traces the history of one of the most representative photographers of the African American fashion scene. Barboza, who worked for Essence, GQ and an array of major publications all through …

NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art is out with a special issue on black fashion, featuring articles by eminent authors and artists. Its goal, as stated in the introduction by the editor Noliwe Rooks (Cornell University), is to approach the subject as “a launching point for thinking about race, gender, politics, powers, and class” (4). This is a good resource …

Order and read Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke U.P., 2015) asap. In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of …

This post contains theoretical annotations on photo-manipulation that I am collecting for a publication on retro-looking fashion photography. *** Digital photography is the main medium of dissemination of vernacular sartorialism and, by extension, of the afrosartorial aesthetic. Selfies are the currency of countless blogs that promote racial cool/beauty/pride (Pham 2015), while fashion blogging depends on digital photography to document emerging trends (Rocamora …