Fabricating Feminism
High Fashion, Sub-Saharan
Fabricating feminism
The
ironies abound: women who can scarcely put food on the table cut
elegant figures on city streets. Families who live in rundown concrete
houses throw lavish feasts, or exchange gifts of expensive cloth and
gold at weddings. This is Dakar, Senegal, in the early 1990s. The
economy has imploded: many men, such as the former public servants
of a collapsed state bureaucracy--the legacy of French colonialism--are
unemployed, yet their wives have become entrepreneurs, designing modish
garments for more elite female clients. Although Senegalese women
traditionally have not worked outside the home, now they are driving
hard bargains in Dakar's thriving international cloth trade.
Such anomalies struck anthropologist Hudita Mustafa, Ph.D. '98, when
she arrived in Dakar in 1991, and they became the focus of her doctoral
dissertation. "There was wide-ranging instability," she says. "To
get international aid, the government had to slash its budget, lopping
off subsidies to industry and making big cuts in its own civil-service
bureaucracy. All the major social institutions broke down. I wondered,
how was it that fashion--not a basic need--could expand in these conditions?"
Eventually Mustafa explained this riddle as "the paradox of crisis
and creativity." As Senegal has forged a postcolonial identity and
wrestled with a painful shift in gender roles, fashion has answered
economic needs and crystallized many social dynamics. 
A fellow of the Rockefeller African Humanities Institute at the DuBois
Institute for Afro-American Studies, Mustafa is revising her thesis
into a book, "Sartorial Modernities," that expands her exploration
of society and fashion in Senegal. For the Senegalese women, the display
of beauty and prosperity became a coping mechanism: women not only
saved face, but tapped into a life-affirming well of creativity.
This outcome has roots not only in the recent crises, but also in
Dakar's long cosmopolitan history, which accepts and blends European,
Islamic, and African influences. Yet it also draws much of its energy
from the emphasis West African societies have long placed on intertwined
notions of beauty and morality. "Senegalese women are noted for their
grace, self-care, and elegance. They are arrestingly beautiful--tall
and dark-skinned," Mustafa says. "The question of the relationship
between exterior, physical beauty and inner, moral beauty comes up
all the time in ordinary conversation." An essay she contributed to
The Art of African Fashion in 1998 states, "Old proverbs warn
against admiring beauty at the expense of goodness, yet, in practice,
beauty is seen as a kind of goodness." Thus inner, moral beauty is
seen to express itself in both behavior and appearance, and becomes
the nexus of the country's deeply ingrained code of conduct, which
centers on courtesy, hospitality, and generosity.
In
everyday life, women, in particular, focus on attending to people,
and sacrifice heavily to give gifts in important social rituals like
weddings and newborn-naming ceremonies. Intense rivalries have
grown up around traditional social functions; families strive to outdo
one another, for example, in outwardly hospitable displays of gift-giving
and feasting. Regarding appearance, women pull out all stops--especially
the elegant, sensual, and corpulent women called dirriankhes
(de-ree-ahn-keys), the icons of Dakar's vibrant popular fashion
culture. "At weddings and naming days," Mustafa writes, "everyone
watches the neighborhood fashion queens for signs of the latest cloth
from Jeddah or the newest embroidery thread."
Dirriankhe,
originally used to describe socially elite women, now applies to any
woman who strives to be well-dressed. The fact that Senegalese both
ridicule and imitate dirriankhes--men and women mock them for
neglecting basic needs to afford their finery, yet women of lesser
means scramble to knock off their high-style outfits, using cheap
material--signaled to Mustafa that fashion embodied a skein of conflicting
meanings and hierarchies.
The frenetic quest to outdress each other has spawned an industry
increasingly ruled by women--in particular, women of the Mouride Brotherhood,
an Islamic Sufi group that is rapidly replacing the old Francophone
elite at the top of Senegalese society. Since the 1980s, women have
dominated the wholesale cloth trade. Traders travel to Europe and
the Middle East to buy luxury fabrics and contract with Hong Kong
manufacturers to produce imitations of luxury cloth for the low-income
market. The new prosperity and power have exacted a price, however.
"Women are facing criticism and vocal resentment," Mustafa says. "On
the street, you hear tailors and other men shouting about being exploited
by women in business dealings. Husbands complain that their wives
are out and about too much in public. Yet some of these same men gave
their wives the seed money to start small businesses that they considered
beneath their own status."
Across class and gender categories and also within them, Mustafa says,
"fashion is the way social rivalry is expressed" in Senegal. Her observations,
she believes, shed light on how cultures and economies are linked--and
on the strategies people use to cope with social and financial upheaval.
"Since a lot of the Third World is in crisis," she says, "it is important
to look at how people engage with such profound change."
~Jane
Roy Brown
Hudita
Mustafa e-mail address: mustafa@fas.harvard.edu
A
Senegalese woman (top) wears a taille-basse, a Euro-African
hybrid. At a wedding, (right) two women wear scarves and bou bous,
traditional Islamic robes considered the pinnacle of fashion. (lower
left) A young woman in a bou bou, by an elite Dakar designer,
made of German cloth embroidered with French silk thread. Her straight-haired
wig is in a style called "Naomi Campbell."
