Installation shot of the multi-media AFRICA FASHION exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London showing various designs and a didactic panel, October, 2022.
Wow!!!! Just finished going through AFRICA FASHION at the Victoria & Albert Museum - an institution which keeps turning out amazing show after amazing show, opening up the narratives visitors experience, and how they experience them (through inventive curation, exhibition design, and digital programming). Some shows are just transformative; you feel changed after leaving the museum or gallery. This is one of those! Spectacular fashion, but so much more…
Succinctly described on the museum’s website as: “Spanning iconic mid-20th century to contemporary creatives through photographs, textiles, music and the visual arts, ‘Africa Fashion’ explores the vitality and global impact of a fashion scene as dynamic and varied as the continent as itself.”
In addition to a panoply of color, pattern, and texture, the garments (photographs and more) deftly installed and enhanced by great exhibit design and didactics, as well as music and video, offer multiple entry points into fashion as a self-defining art form across an ‘Africa’ of multiple histories, cultures, and creative expressions, shared from myriad African perspectives. The expansive experience, a celebration of sorts, is layered, nuanced, polyphonic. Go see it! Or at least visit the V&A’s site to learn more.