Joining the #IAS_NUQ Virtual Event Series, Okechukwu Nwafor, assistant professor of art history at Wesleyan University, examined Aso Ebi, a traditional Yoruba uniform and dressing style adopted by communities in West Africa, and its impact on urban visibility in Lagos. In his talk, Nwafor shared insights from his book, Aso Ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa, examining how Aso Ebi emerged in the early twentieth century in Lagos at a time of rapid urbanization to signify and shape identities, social relations, and class. Nwafor described how - as a practice deeply imbricated in new cosmopolitan subjectivities, global textile markets, urban sensibilities, and new media technologies such as photography - Aso Ebi has been central to the post-colonial urban experience in Lagos and West African more broadly, where it is constantly renegotiated and reinvented.
The Nigerian and West African practice of Aso Ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso Ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice.
The book suggests that dress, fashion, Aso Ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of Aso Ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents Aso Ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity.
The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso Ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture, it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow.
This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.
The book talk was part of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South’s #IAS_NUQ Virtual Event series. For upcoming events and talks by #IAS_NUQ, click here.
*Book description by Indiana University Press.
