The Curious History of ?Tribal? Prints

As Europeans began to sell this cloth, in West Africa?largely to women, both rich and poor, who regarded it as a marker of status?West African tastes shaped the evolving designs. The local women traders who distributed the fabrics favored brighter palettes, tighter patterns, and geometric shapes. New patterns were designed to reflect significant events and local proverbs. Though European manufacturers identified the fabrics by number, West African traders often named them, and those names became widely known. One famous pattern that shows a bird cage with an open door and a little bird escaping from it is called ?You fly, I fly.? It is generally worn by newlywed women, as a bit of a threat to their husbands. ?The minute they are named, they are also used to communicate,? says Jessica Helbach, a Dutch curator whose design studio worked extensively with Vlisco, one of the main Dutch wax manufacturers, to launch an exhibit now up at the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem about the company?s history. Helbach says that naming the fabrics, and using them to express certain ideas, is a way for West Africans to claim the foreign-made cloth as their own. And so the machine-made Indonesian-inspired patterned fabrics became indelibly associated with Africa?and with a particular notion of African tribalness, of which Western fashion cannot get enough.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=c78a6077aaeef46510e34e62cda96a39

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