Fashion says: wear my name, bear my name, be a member of my tribe. I’ll make you beautiful.
We say: you already have it in you, share it with us. Feel beautiful in our jewels.
Once upon a time I was just like any twenty year old college girl: I strove to match my outside with those ubiquitous images of beauty, luxury and fabulousness. Those fluffy preoccupations didn’t exactly jive with my daily nitty gritty, but I managed to intellectualize fashion the day I opened a book about dress in then modern day Africa.
I was a graduate student at University of Chicago getting my Master’s in international relations. I focused on Apartheid South Africa for my thesis. Because the best Africana library in the Chicago area was at Northwestern, I would take the trek from Hyde Park to Evanston and plant myself in the library for a good long study haul.
Of course, I was easily bored (don’t tell my children) when I looked up text after text in those pre-Googleazoic days. I found myself meandering to the pictures- and oh what pictures they were: Maasai women in their round beaded collars, Wodaabe charm dancers with yellow striped faces, Berber brides in giant baubles of amber. Then a thought struck me- those Fulani women, with the coins in their hair? They were showing their family’s wealth through adornment. Just like the pictures I used to see in my Yiayia’s (grandmother’s) house in Thessaloniki, Greece- the women wore coins on their vests to display THEIR family’s treasure. Burkina Faso. Greece. India. Ukraine. All the same.
For thousands of years, we humans have been telling who we are without saying a word- through