Today I visited the exhibition “Fashion Cities Africa” at Brighton Museum. It’s the first major exhibition in the UK focusing on contemporary African fashion and presents very diverse styles, from couture to street. It focused on fashion in the popular cities, Casablanca in Morocco, Lagos in Nigeria, Nairobi in Kenya and Johannesburg in South Africa. I was most interested in the range of different wax prints on some of the clothing and the way the outfits are pattern on pattern.
I was also inspired by this image by Velma Rossa and Papa Petit. They created this unique
look by using reclaimed clothes from the City’ lively “mitumba” (second-hand clothing) industry. Although the colours and patterns don’t match they look individual and quirky.
In contrast to the second hand wax print clothes which I liked, the “Fucshia lame dress with sequin embroidery” created in 2015 by Lanre da Silva Ajayi was my favourite piece in the exhibition. I love the way the material softly hangs and how you can see sections of the pattern in each pleat.
After looking around the exhibition Eva and I then played around with second hand clothes which were available there for us to try on and recreated our take on African Fashion styled on ourselves!
