Paper short abstract:

This presentation identifies sensuous experiences and actors involved in Whatsapp-mediated ankara trading. Nigerian adaptability to the app mitigates overwhelming market experiences and encourages ankara circulation as sellers and customers may interact instantly in Nigeria and abroad.

Paper long abstract:

The Balogun Market in Lagos, Nigeria, is one of the leading markets for ankara - manufactured fabrics based on the Javanese batiks produced by European and Chinese companies marketed to West Africa. Nigeria has adopted and popularized this fabric and its derived styles, reflecting its cultural significance in the Black Diaspora. Ankara is handled by several actors establishing a complex trade matrix. Observation in various trading places and qualitative interviews revealed that ankara shopping experience is ambivalent. Perception of the market as a source of inspiration that unlocks creative possibilities coexist with contempt for its hectic environment, which might be stressful, time-consuming, or dangerous. This paper identifies sensuous and social experiences of actors involved in ankara trading, which are mediated by the use of media technologies, namely WhatsApp. Furthermore, it reveals its role in the further dissemination and circulation of ankara. The advance of WhatsApp use in Nigeria circumvents those obstacles, resulting in a distinctive trading experience. By integrating other technologies, such as instant bank transfers, Whatsapp adequately addresses challenges of developing countries. E-trading mitigates some downsides of ankara trading in physical markets and helps find and maintain new customers. It speeds the prints' selection process and increases the circulation of ankara fabrics and clothes even to areas situated far beyond the country. The study highlights the resilience and inventiveness of the Nigerian fashion market, overcoming financial and structural hardship through fabric trade and fostering the app functionalities beyond their original affordance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how mobile phones and digital images created affordances for young women to become digital fashionistas or fashion influencers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, share digital images of their crafted styles via social media apps, especially WhatsApp. Such sharing is an act of influence usually aimed at building a digital fashionista name in that it constitutes a virtual potential for persuading others to copy one’s style. When this potential is engaged with women of status and rank it enables young women to fashion relations of matronage and brings about upward social mobility. In order to reach out to women of status and rank, young women mobilize digital networks of followers from among peers, kin, and strangers relying on their skills, status, and knowledge. By circulating, images of their crafted styles over these networks young women aim to attract followers for advice in fashion and style. Yet virtual images can be easily kept and shared by others allowing followers to compete with fashionistas, form their own groups, and start their own trends. Whether a follower will share an image of one’s style further and thus build one’s name depends on the actual and potential benefits – social, affective, economic – such sharing can bring to the follower herself, revealing, I argue, interdependency between stylish leaders and their wealth in followers as the key to making and maintaining value, digital fashionista name. This article contributes to the literature on fashion and upward social mobility in West Africa by showing how the circulation of digital images over social media networks has created affordances for young women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon to fashion matronage relations and open up upward social mobility paths. More broadly, wealth in followers provides a critique of the neoliberal market valuation of social media influencers illuminating alternative regimes of valuation that inform digital influencer economies.

Paper short abstract:

Popularly, isishweshwe is assumed as indigenous to South Africa given the textile's manufacture in Zwelitsha since 1948. However, its origins are in Lancaster, England. This paper traces isishweshwe’s South Africa seeding and entrenchment from 1948 onwards.

Paper long abstract:

In the popular imagination – locally and beyond – isishweshwe is indigenous to South Africa. This detail is taken as a given because, since 1948, the textile has been manufactured in Zwelitsha township in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. In contemporary South Africa, what is foregrounded is this Eastern Cape detail, grounding the indigeneity and authenticity discourses that surround the textile. Simultaneously, the global and domestic political-economic and racial capitalist dimensions are dismembered and hidden from shweshwe’s story. However, this emphasis tends to ignore the textile’s roots elsewhere. Specifically, as an industrial good, its origins predate the 1948 opening of the Da Gama plant in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Isishweshwe’s industrial origins are in Lancaster’s 19th-century textile industry: the culmination of British imperial penetration and appropriation of India’s artisanal cotton industry. Against the backdrop of Britain’s decimation of the Indian cotton industry, the proposed paper will explore the Manchester-South Africa chapter of this history, recounting the structural dynamics that gave culminated in the much-loved isishweshwe textile’s production in South Africa. It contextualises isishweshwe’s long history against the backdrop of domestic settler colonial dynamics following the Union of South Africa’s formation in 1910 and global imperial relations between Southern Africa and Britain. The paper argues that, domestically, isishweshwe’s industrial seeding in South Africa was a direct consequence of the Union of South Africa’s industrialisation drive, diversifying the economy away from the mining industry’s dominance. These early 20th-century attempts at expanding the country’s manufacturing base intersected with the British textile industry’s search for new textile production sites to maintain a degree of the industry’s global competitiveness amid growing pressures from, among others, Japanese competition. In effect, isishweshwe’s manufacture in South Africa occurred at the intersection of distinct international and domestic political-economic conditions that shweshwe came to be manufactured in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

Paper short abstract:

The weaving program at the ONG DIMA school in Niamey teaches Nigerien téra-tera style weaving to students in hopes of not only preserving the tradition of regional strip-woven cotton textiles, but also providing youth with job opportunities through the innovation of traditional styles of cloth.

Paper long abstract:

The weaving program at the ONG DIMA school in Niamey teaches Nigerien téra-tera style weaving to young students in hopes of not only preserving the tradition of regional strip-woven cotton textiles, but also providing youth with job opportunities. They are keenly aware, however, of the dwindling market for these heavy textiles which is thankfully paired with the desire for a lighter, wearable local cloth. While teaching a workshop at DIMA, we worked with four and eight-shaft floor looms to translate téra-tera patterns to clothing-weight twills.

DIMA is inspired by the faso dan fani in neighboring Burkina Faso that was popularized by former President Thomas Sankara’s push to rely on products created in Burkina Faso instead of imports as a means for greater economic independence. They are also concerned with their environment and sourcing local materials that are more eco-friendly than the imported synthetic thread available in the markets. DIMA is educating the community about traditional Nigerien weaving, encouraging the building of infrastructure required to train and support weavers, and producing innovative samples of a tradition-based textiles re-imagined for a national market that is eager to wear their cultural identity.

As both a weaver and an art historian, the opportunity to witness this juncture in Nigerien weaving history presents me with a range of inquiries pertaining to: the perceived dichotomy between tradition and innovation, the dynamics of multinational relationships in the development of artistic practices, and the realities of educating the next generation in a rapidly changing global market.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent fieldwork in Ghana and digitally on social media, this paper explores how independent fashion designers who target cosmopolite audiences navigate a global fashion system that craves for “sustainable” and “authentic” ways of consuming clothing.

Paper long abstract:

How does local notions of sustainability translate to global audiences, and vice versa, how does standardized notions of sustainability translate into local fashion making? This paper sheds light on how the notion of “sustainability” affects independent fashion designers in Ghana. Through ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted in Accra both pre- and post-pandemic and digitally online, I trace the material and digital realities of artisanal fashion brands that produce locally, utilize expert craftmanship and hand-woven fabrics, among other "indigenous" techniques related to garment manufacturing. My interlocutors based their sustainability claims on sociality and aesthetics, which differed from the material-centred sustainability discourse in the West. Many designers favoured an unfinished look that was inherently present in most hand-woven fabrics as it signalled authenticity and uniqueness in the global marketplace. However, as larger retailers started to show interest, it was exactly the unfinishedness that created tensions as retailers were customed to unified quality standards. These material tensions were outweighed by the market desires: as the notion of sustainability was understood by the global audiences as an indication of morally produced clothing, the bid for morality seemingly extended to the designers as well. My interlocutors faced a post-BLM fashion system that was infatuated with Black culture in general and craved for ‘authenticity’ and ‘inclusivity’, and Ghanaian fashion satisfied this need. In this paper I argue that the sustainability discourse opens new possibilities for Ghanaian designers looking to enter the global fashion system.