Paper short abstract:

Creative practices of making fashion in Senegal that include copying, reproduction, and remediation of existing forms and styles can open new perspectives on debates of post/de/colonialism and knowledge production.

Paper long abstract:

All over the continent, fashion made in Senegal is associated with elegant beauty, and Senegalese tailors are widely accredited with inventiveness and creativeness. The rich history of fashion in the country is intimately linked to an early cosmopolitanism connected to a taste for the new in the fashioning of the persona, and tailors and dyers are constantly pushed by their clientele. By way of ‘sartorial code-mixing’ (Kastner 2019) meaning the combination of a range of materials and styles from different periods and spaces, unique and tailor-made products are crafted in thousands of street corner workshops and ateliers. Based on ethnographic research and in line with recent scholarship (Ingold and Hallam 2007; Meyer and Svasek 2016) that argues against a limited understanding of creativity as pure innovation and rather advocates the inclusion of practices of copying, reproduction, and remediation of existing forms and styles, I suggest that making fashion, both critical and playful, can open new perspectives on debates of post/de/colonialism and knowledge production: Critical or playful, fashion makers question and reverse conventionally assumed flows and categories by means of the very act of creating tradi-moderne fashion, of processing raw materials in form of imported fabrics according to local aesthetic preferences or of adapting so-called traditional garments to meet the realities of urban life.