A Chat With Elizabeth Way, Curator of Africa's Fashion Diaspora at FIT
It felt particularly timely to have this conversation on November 7
Two days after the election, I had the honor of interviewing Elizabeth Way, the brilliant mind behind FIT’s current groundbreaking exhibition Africa’s Fashion Diaspora as well as the co-curator of critical shows such as Black Fashion Designers; Fresh, Fly, Fabulous: 50 Years of Hip Hop Style; and Global Fashion Capitals and Black Fashion Designers.
Focusing on the intersection of Black American culture and fashion, Elizabeth’s work (I’ll go by her first name since we know each other) not only uncovers but actively broadcasts Black people’s contributions to the fashion canon. I know the stories of couturiers Ann Lowe and Elizabeth Keckly; Haitian designer Fabrice Simon; American fashion pioneers Patrick Kelly and Willi Smith, and so many unsung heroes because of Elizabeth’s dedication to retelling history. What I love most is how accessible her research is; it isn’t just the playground of scholars, doomed to recede into museum archives. It lives in books (which include the work of other academics) and it is constantly mined for events and physical shows you can almost always access for free.
It felt particularly timely to have this conversation on November 7. Suddenly, the request to interview Elizabeth took on a civic dimension, a call for countering the narratives that led to the election results. We discussed the themes of Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, revealing the rich cultural heritage, broken histories and existential questions that connect all Black designers. Elizabeth introduced this notion of political Blackness in the context of being labeled as a Black person or Black designer, and I have not been able to stop thinking about the implications.
I also asked why so much of African fashion literature begins with the period after colonization and the overall whitewashing effect this has on history. “There’s been this narrative through colonization that Africa is in some way lacking in terms of what Europe had, but that’s not true at all,” Elizabeth responded before elaborating on the rich material culture and ethnic diversity that existed in West Africa before slavery took place. To end, we had a round of rapid fire questions where I asked Elizabeth about her favorite exhibitions, a Met Gala theme she wish existed, book recommendations and more.
This interview is long and every bit worth the read. I think you’ll find this post worth upgrading your subscription for.
PS: Meeting Ruben Toledo was also a highlight of the night.
In 2016, you curated Black Fashion Designers, which told the stories of dressmakers and couturiers who’d been left out of history books. Jay Jaxon, Scott Barrie, Ruby Bailey, Wesley Tann to name a few. Today, Africa's Fashion Diaspora is in many ways a continuation of that exhibition as it traces the cultural lineage that connects African diasporic communities. Tell us how this exhibition came to be and why it was important to focus on this topic.
This exhibition is a direct link to an exhibition I co-curated with my former colleague Ariele Elia in 2016 here at FIT called Black Fashion Designers, and that was actually an idea she had come up with. It was inspired by a smaller exhibition at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Adrienne Jones [a professor at Pratt] curated an exhibition called Black Dress and it looked at 10 contemporary designers.
Within that exhibition, she had this large graphic where she listed as many names of Black designers as she could come across. There were probably over 100 names, so Ariele took a photograph and wanted to know how many of those designers were in our collection. From that the Black Fashion Designers exhibition was born. I later edited the book Black Designers in American Fashion as a personal project, but the volume includes the work of a lot of different scholars (including Ariele’s), who each looked at the history of a Black designer who had been relatively unknown. I think the vast majority of them did not have another secondary scholarly work written about them; this was the first.
Black Fashion Designers was warmly received by our audience and that was really special, so our director Dr. [Valerie] Steele asked me to do something bigger. With Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, I really wanted to do something different because Black Fashion Designers was revisionist history and a survey, and it was really looking at the ways that these designers fit into the industry. So for Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, I wanted to take a very narrow and deep look, and I was also really interested in this idea of fashion as storytelling and as contributing to these conversations that we might associate more with philosophers or writers or even musicians or visual artists, but saying that fashion had a lot to say about this topic as well.
I can only imagine how hard it was to condense a topic like this into nine approachable themes. How did you zero in on them?
I literally started with a Word document listing as many Black designers as I could come across. I read WWD and Business of Fashion every day so if I saw a name I didn’t recognize, I’d put it down for later research. But I am very limited by my positionality. I only read and speak English and so when I did the book on this exhibition, also called Africa’s Fashion Diaspora, I was able to draw on other scholars. For example: Joelle Firzli, who is Ivorian and is so vital for telling that history because she grew up there, she knows the designers, she speaks and writes in both English and French. I was able to access a lot of knowledge through my authors as well so it was a real privilege to bring them together and have access to an advisory committee.
It was looking at the different stories that these designers are telling and kind of grouping them together. Again, I’m kind of limited by my own positionality (I’m American and I have that perspective) so in order to think about the diaspora which is impossible to wrap your arms around, I wanted to put the voice of the designers so that I could lean on their positionality as well.
“I think it’s really easy to underestimate how important cotton was to the building of this country, not just in the South but the financing of the North and entire economies caught up in this crop. It is a plant that has changed the world.”
European designers are notorious for incorporating elements of African cultures into their collections. I’m thinking about Yves Saint-Laurent’s 1967 African collection and John Galliano’s Afro wigs for example. But when it comes to Black designers conceptualizing Africa in their work, the issue—as you pointed out before—becomes much more complicated. Can you elaborate on the nuances here?
My chapter in the exhibition book deals specifically with Black Americans’ perceptions of clothing on the continent from the 19th century to the early 21st century. I was really interested in the tensions that presented. What I found was that there are so many reasons why Black designers are interested in the aesthetics of Africa. Saying Africa as a continent is kind of the easiest way to wrap your arms around this concept, but obviously there’s so much specificity in terms of individual cultures.