Slideshow on the New York Times web site
In the 2009 spring season, African style is a drumbeat through the clothes and accessories. Surprisingly it isn’t about the ethnic. Instead, it is the sculpted geometric shapes of Africa and its rich spicy colors that are the strongest forms of identity.
COLOPHON: Struggling to get my blogging mojo back; new job, life have curtailed um, research time.
TECH/CULTURE: The blackboard blogger of Monrovia, Liberia Xeni Jardin (who posted great tweets from a West Africa visit recently) links to an interview of Alfred Sirleaf “an analog blogger” recorded by Eric Hersman aka White African. More here.
Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.
PHOTO ESSAY: Festival au Desert Peter DiCampo covers a Tuareg music festival that takes place annually outside Timbuktu, Mali. [kofia tip: sci-cultura.twitter]
Amadamara by Freddie Gwala
Freddie Gwala: After completing a jail sentence for car theft, Freddie Gwala embarked on a successful international musical career in the 90’s; his personal style/street cred made him a pantsula icon. [via Throwing Shade]
Pantsula?:
Pantsula is a South African township dance form that emerged in the ’50s. It represents a way of life, dress and speech (tsotsitaal) and is considered symbolic of township culture.
In art-world circles, Fosso is often spoken of as Central Africa’s answer to Cindy Sherman. But Sherman’s art evolved in the waning years of the American dream, amid the heady bohemia of late-1970s Manhattan. Fosso arrived at his signature style, while a teenage refugee living in Bangui, the remote capital of the Central African Republic. How this 13-year-old survivor of the Nigerian-Biafran War, drawing from the tradition of African studio portraiture but working in near total isolation, anticipated developments at the cutting edge of contemporary Western art is a mystery in which the artist’s love of fashion plays no small part.
from Man of a Thousand Faces by Leslie Camhi. New York Times T Magazine, Men’s Fashion Spring 2009
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