REVIEW: “Connecting Threads: Africa Fashion” at the Field Museum
Connecting Threads: Africa Fashion, installation view, photo by Caroline Bellios. Image courtesy Bellios and the Field Museum of Natural History.
REVIEW
Connecting Threads: Africa Fashion
The Field Museum of Natural History
1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Dr.
Chicago, IL 60605
March 1, 2025 – March 1, 2026
By Caroline Bellios
Global contemporary fashion does not have an obvious home in Chicago's museums. The Art Institute has not collected tailored garments as earnestly as they have collected textiles; the MCA’s flirtations with fashion are sporadic; the Chicago History Museum has a mandate to only acquire clothing with local connections; and while the Design Museum could be a promising site for fashion, it has yet to build a serious collection. This leaves the city with a noticeable gap in fashion collection and exhibition norms. When the UK’s Victoria & Albert Museum began shopping its blockbuster exhibition, Africa Fashion, it wasn’t clear a Chicago institution would bid to host it. Surprisingly, the Field Museum, best known for its flora and fauna specimens and towering presence of Sue the T. rex, came forward. But the Field is only partially comprised of wonders of the natural world; it is also rich with marvels of human culture and creation. Fashion in the past and present is how we create and communicate our identities, individually and in community, and with this exhibition the Field has created new narratives for its collections, boldly linking them to contemporary design, and human futures.
Exhibiting African fashion in an institution that had historically displayed cultural objects and garments from indigenous cultures and the Global South (as though those societies had been subsumed and did not have a place in the modern dialogue) helps to reintegrate the relevance of those societies in our continuing human chronicle. Perhaps this is a story of revisions and reparations in a museum collection, or perhaps it is a story of how colonization did not eliminate the traditions of making and dressing—they remained, they were adapted, and with independence, they have shone forth. The pieces in Africa Fashion speak to tradition, but also resilience, self-definition, and a defiant modernity.
Models holding hands, Lagos, Nigeria, 2019 by Stephen Tayo. Courtesy Lagos Fashion Week. Credit: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023.
The exhibition opens with a look at Africa’s independence era (1950s–1990s), framing fashion as a declaration of freedom and agency. In anticipation of the garments, visitors are introduced to graphic arts, publications, and music of that time that express the spirit of liberation. This prelude sets the stage, embracing fashion as a form of revolution—one more subtle than a poster perhaps, but no less impactful. Or as the curator Christine Checinska, the V&A’s inaugural Senior Curator African and Diaspora Textiles and Fashion, noted, “Fashion was fundamental to the decolonization of mind.” What follows are 180 looks from over 20 countries across the continent revealing a cultural renaissance through appearance as one African country after another reclaimed freedoms and recentered identities; the “abundant creativity” illustrates an era filled with choices and becoming.
One way in which fashion exhibitions are uniquely challenging is that unlike a painting that fully realizes its artistic intent when hung on a gallery wall, garments are made for humans to wear on their bodies—for movement and for touch. This garmentness is never fully realized when viewed on a mannequin. Human touch and movement would destroy the object over time, and so the exhibition compensates for that archival limitation through rich, absorbing video work and photography documenting both everyday and exceptional fashion moments. The projected videos display fashion shows and garments in motion on screens large enough that even in crowded spaces they allow for appreciation of how these clothes move with and respond to the human form. Music accompanies the videos, loud enough to be ever present but never overpowering, providing a rhythmic soundtrack to even the stationary garments, creating an enhanced environment where garments are not just seen but experienced as though imbued with motion, as they were meant to be.
A short film about the joys of dancing like everyone’s watching. Who Dey Shake is a short film and photographic story by Lagos-based artist Lakin Ogunbanwo, made in collaboration with the V&A and Nataal magazine. The idea for the project was sparked by curator Dr Christine Checinska’s interest in the culture of movement and how clothing and adornment relates to identity through the performance of style. This story was originally published in issue 3 of Nataal magazine, in partnership with the V&A's Africa Fashion exhibition. Credit: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023.
The most joyful use of video is Who Dey Shake, commissioned for the exhibition from Lagos-based artist Lakin Ogunbanwo. In the piece, nine different garments—displayed in stillness on mannequins in the same room as the screen—are brought to life by dancers of varying body types and movements. The visitor witnesses the gratefulness of a body that can move, the pride in knowing you and your adornments are in harmony, and the exhilaration that in this moment of personal celebration, you are seen. For visitors, the experience is an invitation into a communal moment of cultural movement, playful performance, and human joy. (One that can even be re-enjoyed at home!)
The color of mannequins has long been another dilemma in the display of garments. Just as the fallacious argument is made that a white cube is a neutral space, for many decades, a white mannequin was argued to be the same and used as the default display body. Mannequins stand in for human bodies, but humans aren’t walls, and our color can’t be easily swapped out with a can of paint, And in mannequins the whiteness isn’t just in the color, but also the features. Grey mannequins and their cousins—the silver mannequin and the bright crayon-colored mannequin—have been used in an attempt to “neutralize” the figure, but humans aren’t grey, metallic, or green. We are many warm shades of milk and coffee, tea and tequila. A garment on a purple body, while dramatic, introduces a discord of color that was not part of the designer’s intent nor the human visual experience. The exhibition addresses these outdated norms with mannequins in a range of skin tones and hair styles reached through a collaborative exchange amongst the V&A’s Global Narratives Network, a multicultural network of staff, and work by the conservation team to design and develop mannequin heads with representative faces and hairstyles.
Mannequin color workshop with V&A Global Narratives Network, 2021. Credit: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023.
As African fashion continues its explosive growth and prominence, there is hope that the diversity of ideal beauty in body shape will also be represented. While African fashion is finding its global audience, Paris is still considered the pinnacle of high fashion and often the definitive word on beauty—it is the desired destination for training and to acquire that elite sheen of having been a part of fashion’s inner circle. Runways around the globe, including many of the ones seen in this exhibition’s videos, are dominated by bodies adhering to established European standards of fashionable appearance—long, thin, lithe—a body type admired in certain regions of Africa, but not representative of the ideals of the majority. The dominance of Western beauty ideals is an ongoing struggle in fashion and one that designers from Africa might be poised to impact in the future.
This exhibition also presents differently in the US than it did in the UK. African-American is not African. While the UK had a significant role in the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonized much of Africa, the understanding and history of race relations in the UK are distinct from the deeply embedded brutality and segregation that shape the American experience. There is a difference between violence that happens in your name at a distance and violence committed in your own backyard. The scars America carries are unique and deep, and Africa Fashion here opens a dialogue about that complicated lineage in ways that expand beyond even its complexities in previous locations.
Connecting Threads: Africa Fashion, installation view. Photographer unknown. Image courtesy the Field Museum of Natural History.
I am writing as a white, Midwestern woman raised in an immigrant household, and I refer to myself as Greek-American. While I cannot know or truly understand the trauma of African-Americans descended from enslaved peoples, I do recognize one similarity amongst Americans who still identify with their ancestors’ homelands. Whether our ancestors arrived through bondage, desperation, or hope, their country of origin is frozen in time at the moment they left. The Greece I know is the Greece of 1927, the year my grandmother was married and then immigrated to the US—a place where she had no family or friends and no knowledge of the language. But while she was changing and adapting in the US, so was Greece, and the Greece I know transformed into something different long before I was born. It followed a path of modernity just as my grandmother did but they were divergent modernities. Greek-American is not Greek, just as African-American is not African. The cultures, nations, and people of Africa continued to change and develop after the ancestors of many present-day Black Americans were brought here in bondage. These layers of identity are textured, complex, and rich with the weight of both history and transformations.
Moronke Ogundolie and Omowunmi Ogunmola, in garments that are featured in Connecting Threads: Africa Fashion, makeup by Crystal-Eyez Makeup, Hair by Akese Stylelines. Credit: © 2024 Field Museum, Photos by Isi Akahome.
Often, a visual shorthand for textiles or garments that a designer wants the viewer to know are “African” involves using message-filled Ankara wax print fabrics, or bright strips of Kente cloth—both prominent in West Africa, the home of the ancestors of many Black Americans. So different from fabric prints and patterns favored in Western Europe, and so strongly identified with Africa, they have become an immediately recognizable connection to an African identity. These fabrics are potent with symbolism, reflecting the socio-political histories of the regions they come from, yet often become a substitute for deeper engagement with the diversity of design across the continent. This exhibition reveals not just a wide variety of African textile traditions from palm fiber Kuba cloth to indigo dyed Àdìrẹ, but the vast diversity and the complexity of African identities beyond what might be typically encountered in the United States.
The companion exhibition to Africa Fashion, the Field’s Connecting Threads: African and African-American Fashion in Chicago, is situated across Stanley Field Hall and directly connected to their permanent Africa exhibition spaces. A major component of this local exhibition asked designers working in Chicago to respond to cultural artifacts held in the Field’s care. This project helps to illuminate contemporary connections for cultures whose creative output is collected within these walls; visitors can see they are not dead cultures, but an unbroken continuity has survived in their descendants who continue to tell their stories. The garments are beautiful, but because of this looking back, the feeling is one of nostalgia and melancholy for that preserved Africa of the moment of departure rather than the pure joy of an independent, uninhibited future demonstrated across the hall.
Imane Ayissi, Mbeuk Idourrou collection, Paris, France. Autumn/Winter collection, 2019 Photo by Fabrice Malard / Courtesy of Imane Ayissi. Credit: Africa Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2 July 2022 – 16 April 2023.
Africa Fashion positions the Field Museum not just as a keeper of the past but as a platform for living culture. The Field and the V&A are both built on the remnants of World’s Fairs from their respective cities. The modern day guardians of those shadowy remains of global bragaddocio are finally, rightfully, catching their collections up to the diversity, creativity, and modernity of the art and design of Africa, and decolonizing learned hierarchies of creativity. This exhibition is a declaration of identity and independence, one that insists African fashion is not only alive—it’s thriving.
Caroline Bellios (she/her) is a professor of fashion design and history. Her current research ranges from 19th century hair jewelry, embodiment, and the transformative nature of touch, to the potential of fashion in the museum space, the memory space, and as a platform for inclusivity. With colleagues in the city, Caroline is a founder of the Chicago Fashion Lyceum, a collaborative body for fashion discourse. Lyceum provides a platform for research sharing and collegial camaraderie and continues expanding this work of community within our local spaces, nationally, and internationally. Caroline’s recent writing has explored the work of exhibition maker Judith Clark in Bloomsbury’s publication Fashion, Dress and Post-PostModernity, and how we dress and present our bodies in Fairchild Books’ The Meanings of Dress. She would also like to hear stories about your grandmother.
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