Art and commerce

Shoreditch – where I happily live – attracts large crowds on Friday and Saturday nights, dressed in a variety of colourful but wholly impractical costumes, spilling out onto the streets from the cocktail bars, clubs, and restaurants: clothes for show: circus wear.  Early the following morning the streets are cleaned by men and women in heavy boots, overalls, and thick gloves, who remove the vast amounts of debris – glasses, bottles, discarded food containers, and nitrous oxide canisters – and sweep-up and wash the pavements and kerbsides.  The Sunday morning crowd is dressed for work, not pleasure: function trumps style: industrial wear.   

Our attire is a sign of our standing, of our place in the world.  If I were to wander through an art museum, looking at figurative paintings from, say, Bruegel onwards, it would be easy to distinguish those who must work to live from those who lived off the work of others.  It is said that the clerical class in ancient China grew their fingernails long, to make it obvious to others that they worked at desks rather than by manual labour.  In Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, painted in 1523, the nails are short but the fingers inky: scholarly hands.

If the style of our clothes tells a story about who we are and how we live, the fabric from which our clothes are made tells a different but equally important story about the trade in raw materials and manufactured goods.  Whereas once most people wore clothes that were made locally from materials that were gathered locally – whether animal skins or plant products – today’s clothes are manufactured in places where labour is cheap and transport links are good, from a wide range of natural and synthetic materials that are often sourced far away from where the garments are sold.  What we wear today reflects our position in a complex global trading system.  While economists tend to focus on the processes of manufacturing and distribution, quantifying the financial value of goods made, transported, and sold, it is artists who are best able to help us think about what this means for both makers and buyers, to consider the symbolic value of the fabrics within which we wrap ourselves.

There is an interesting exhibition currently on show at White Conduit Projects, a small gallery in Islington, of work by the Angolan artist Januário Jano.  The artworks are made from a diverse range of materials, including cloth from Japan, archive photographs, found objects, pottery, and paint.  Jano uses combinations of these materials to suggest connections between, first, the traditional fabrics and cultural practices of his homeland, second, materials and practices that have been borrowed or appropriated from other places through processes of cultural exchange and mutuality, and third, clothing and ideas that were imposed on his homeland by European colonials.  His work draws particular attention to the close connection between what Angolan women were obliged to wear and what they were encouraged to believe, during the period of Portuguese rule. 

While the message of the exhibition is forceful, the work itself is never didactic.  Much is abstract in form, comprising blocks of coloured material sewn together into composites that display variations in texture, tone, and colour: reminiscent more of Mondrian than Heartfield.  The figurative work, drawn mainly from photographs, is dignified and sympathetic.  Other pieces, more sculptural in form, are ambiguous in their allusions and meanings.  In all cases the work is engaging, encouraging the viewer to look closely and enjoy the contrasting textures of the materials used, the softening effect of the fabric abutting harder porcelain forms, the historical resonance of the patterns and colours within the various styles of cloth, the grain of old photographs juxtaposed with the weave of the fabric.  I left the exhibition with a renewed sense of the connection between the way we dress and our sense of identity and place. 

Last month, I visited an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, of work by Abdulrazaq Awofeso, a Nigerian-born artist who now lives in England, which addressed similar themes to Jano’s work, but making use of very different source materials.  Awofeso creates artworks from wooden pallets that have been discarded after having been used to transport goods around the world, by cutting them into small pieces, which he then reassembles in the form of small figurative sculptures.  His materials are, in a literal sense, the objects upon which international trade has been facilitated, but they are also, in a symbolic sense, representative of those people who are the subjects of a different form of international trade.  Awofeso is interested in the global movement of goods, but also the global movement of labour, and the cities where many of the migrant workers live. 

In one room at the gallery, a group of sculpted figures were painted in a variety of brightly coloured clothes, suggestive of a fashion parade in miniature.  These works might suggest a connection with ‘La Sape’ – or, to give the organisation’s full name, ‘La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes’ – which is a Congolese cultural and fashion movement, centred on Kinshasa and Brazzaville, whose members, both men and women, dress-up in Western style formal clothes.  Many of the original sapeurs were servants of the French colonial occupiers, who kept their employers’ discarded clothes, mended and amended them, and wore them on special occasions as a sign of their rejection of Western notions of superiority.  As one sapeur commented, you can’t say we copy white people, we take their clothes and wear them better.  This is fashion as an act of reappropriation: African people reclaiming their dignity and independence by making use of the same clothes that previous generations of Westerners thought made them different from and better than the Africans, whose lands they had stolen.  Like Jeno, Awofeso points to the role played by fabric in colonial rule and the way in which clothes can become symbols of resistance to that process.  Both artists make their point with verve and humour: the artworks are a pleasure on the eye as well as a provocation to the mind. 

This theme of fashion as a site of political contest and cultural fusion is also evident at a major exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, called Africa Fashion, which I recently visited with my daughter.  The first part of the exhibition focuses on Africa in the 1960s, when many countries regained their political independence, and African designers who had trained in Paris and London, went back to set up businesses in their homelands.  The blending of local fabrics and traditional garments with the latest trends from the catwalks of Europe led to a series of vibrant, modernist designs for those able to afford them.  These were clothes made for the local elite, not for the masses.   Over time, as evidenced by the second half of the exhibition, African designers have included traditional materials, colours and patterns in their contemporary designs, and these styles have been exported back to Western fashion houses.  These clothes styles are more popular, more accessible. 

Fashion is a vast global industry, with products ranging from expensive bespoke suits, dresses, coats, and shoes that only the rich can afford, to the mass-produced t-shirts, jeans, and training shoes worn by ordinary people all around the world.  The fashion dialogue between Africa and Europe is now much more balanced than during the time of empires: instead of Western powers dumping cheaply manufactured fabric into their colonies, undermining the traditional local production of clothes, today there is a more equal exchange of materials and ideas, developing new ways of making and wearing clothes.  There is no longer any presumption that one set of clothes, or one type of fabric is superior to the other.  The economics are still far from perfect, in fashion as in other sectors, but they are much better than they used to be. 

For artists, the basic materials of the garment industry – the fabric that is dyed and cut to make our clothes; and the wooden pallets on which the fabric, dyes, and finished goods, are moved around the world – provide a medium through which to explore the politics and aesthetics of the modern world: these materials are objects of exchange that are traded globally, but also objects of personal use, to which we develop strong emotional attachments.   The art of fashion is as important as the economy of fashion, the symbolic exchange as powerful as the monetary exchange.  We need artists to help us understand this world, as much as we need economists.   How we clothe ourselves has always been a blend of the functional and the decorative. Thanks to contemporary artists, we can also understand the twin role of clothes, as modes of domination and of resistance.