Beauty and the Beast: A History of West African Fashion and Sustainability (ARTHIST 107, DLCL 101, FEMGEN 107)

The focus of this course is to examine the life cycle of African textiles and fashion industry and how these relate to fashion sustainability. We will explore the degree to which West African cultural practices and sartorial choices are inherently underpinned by sustainability principles, especially among women. The history of textiles in Africa also connects them to a transnational process dating from the pre-colonial and colonial periods from the 15th to the early 20th centuries, where Dutch, Danish, French and English merchants were responsible for introducing fabrics and styles from Indonesia, China, and India into the West African economy. The course will focus especially on the history of African print cloths popularized by Vlisco, a Dutch company first established in 1848 whose products have dominated the high-end textile economy since then but which is also being challenged by impressive knock-off versions of their patterns from China. African print cloth motifs have also appeared in the collections of some of the most upscale European fashion houses such as Dior, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Stella McCartney, among various others. The course will also focus on questions of sustainability, centering especially on the secondhand clothes markets in Accra, Lome, and Lagos. The global fashion industry is second only to the oil industry in terms of environmental pollution, and it is the secondhand clothes industry that shows the effects of this pollution most dramatically. We will follow the provenance of these clothes from Canada, the US, the UK, Australia, and China, how they are shipped to Accra and other places in West Africa, and the problems of waste disposal that they generate. This will then be tied to larger questions relating to global fashion sustainability in the Global North, where the rhetoric of environmental awareness increasingly demanded by customers and clients often conceals the long-held practice of dumping unused clothes in various locations in the Global South.