Not African? Contested Origins of Wax Print and Its High-Fashion Appropriation

Abstract

Abstract: In 2017, British fashion designer Stella McCartney’s 2018 spring collection, featuring clothing in prints widely regarded as African, was criticized by commentators as an act of cultural appropriation. Similar criticism emerged two years later when the House of Dior used African prints in its Resort 2020 collection. This was despite the fact that in the case of Dior, the fashion house worked with textile designers in Côte d’Ivoire. Some of the responses to the charges of appropriation included the claim that “African fabric…isn’t African” and noted the Dutch-mediated Indonesian origins of wax prints made for the African market and claimed by many as African culture; they also pointed to the provenance of the fabrics used in both collections in the Dutch corporation, Vlisco (in the case of McCartney), and its Ivorian subsidiary, Uniwax (in the case of Dior). Yet other voices questioned the relative merits of wax prints and handmade indigenous fabrics as markers of “African-ness.” Drawing on media coverage of the two collections and the debates they generated, as well as scholarship on the history of the prints, this article explores the contested origins of these textiles. It considers the labor of African market women in wax print’s aesthetic development, and the cultural contexts and consumption practices that inform its circulation and value in African societies and markets and beyond. Drawing comparisons with the history of handmade kente cloth from the Asante people of Ghana, and practices and values around the consumption and circulation of kente, the article seeks to identify criteria that can guide in responding to the contested origin claims around the prints in the McCartney collection of 2017 and the Dior collection of 2019. Using those criteria, it then examines the claims of appropriation in the specific instances of the two collections and, more generally, in the debates around the appropriation of African textiles.