African-Print Fashion Now! A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style

Mar 26 2017 - Jul 30 2017

African-Print Fashion Now introduces visitors to a dynamic and diverse African dress tradition and the increasingly interconnected fashion worlds that it inhabits: “popular” African-print styles created by local seamstresses and tailors across the continent; international runway fashions designed by Africa’s newest generation of couturiers; and boundary-breaking, transnational, and youth styles favored in Africa’s urban centers. All feature the colorful, boldly designed, manufactured cotton textiles that have come to be known as “African-print cloth.”

The exhibition tells the global stories of these textiles—the early history of the print cloth trade in West and Central Africa, the expansion of production following independence movements, and the increasing popularity of Asian-made print cloth today. Popular African styles from Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Senegal are featured, as well as groundbreaking runway fashions by some of Africa’s most talented couturiers. [....] Black-and-white studio portraits illuminate print fashions of the 1960s and 1970s, while works by contemporary artists incorporate African print to convey evocative messages about heritage, hybridity, displacement, and aspiration.

[....] Throughout the exhibition, African-print fashions are considered as creative responses to key historical moments and the imaginings of Africa in the future.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.

Whether or not you go, you might be interested in 

African Prints (Schiffer Book for Designers and Collectors)

Printed designs include abstract, floral, pictorial, animal and figural themes on contemporary cotton fabric, many designs based on traditional African woven textiles.


  • Africa
  • Design
  • Omar Victor Diop
  • Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou
  • Hassan Hajjaj
  • Njideka Akunyili Crosby
  • Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga
  • Docta
  • and others

Exhibition Venues & Dates