West African Fashion

Photo by Ashanda

Yesterday I had to go back to buy MORE of the Obama fabric for another friend, who will use hers as a table cloth. (you may recall that my friend and I are having dresses made; there was a fantastic show at the Bard Center for Decorative Arts a while back that included "patriotic" dresses, scarves, table cloths, etc. from Japan, the UK, the USA, and France from WWII - to-die-for and also sinister)  So we went back to the fantastic purveyor of wax cloth, other fabrics, jewelry, and bling, Kaarta, at 121 W. 125th Street. We also checked out the Malcolm Shabazz Market, which had ready-made clothes, such as the absolutely gorgeous dresses - one might say schmattas or batas - like the one above, which features a football print. Football being soccer of course, one of the handful of sports I actually like. 

The Bard show was called Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931-1945, and there is a catalogue, edited by Jacqueline M. Atkins, (2005).