Between De-Growth, De-Fashion & Re-Distribution – Erica de Greef: African Fashion (Un)Folded

Fashion Talk at AUP 2023/24: Between De-Growth, De-Fashion & Re-Distribution – Erica de Greef: African Fashion (Un)Folded

The Fold is a project that brings the performative act of folding that which is folded away, into focus.

In this talk, South African curator and academic Dr Erica de Greef introduces The Fold, a decolonising project that brings the performative act of folding that which is folded away, into focus. Fold-words, foldings, unfoldings and refoldings become sites of resistance, remembering and redress, and offer radical possibilities for rethinking and reframing African Fashion Studies.

Both as archive and as a dynamic – fashioning cultural survival and modes of community-making and re-making – pleats, layers creases hold everyday expressions, deep histories and diverse cultural sensibilities. What happens when we read these African fashion folds not as new, but as resurgent forms from the long past, enfolded and indigenous, tactile and sonic, embodied and connected, to earth and to others?

African Fashion (Un)Folded gestures at fashion in the creases and spaces between de-growth, de-Fashion and re-distribution. Working at the intersection of folds and shifting perceptions of contemporary fashion knowledges, languages and practices, Erica explores questions of repair and redress through post-colonial archives, secondhand fashion, cultural sustainabilities and the notion of an afro-avant garde as a future poetics of being (with others) in the world.

This talk is part of this year's Fashion Talks at AUP entitled: Between De-Growth, De-Fashion & Re-Distribution – organized by Professor Renate Stauss and Professor Sophie Kurkdjian (Fashion Studies, Department of Communication, Media and Culture)

About Erica de Greef

Dr. Erica de Greef is a dedicated decolonial disruptor, and cofounder of the African Fashion Research Institute in South Africa, graduating with a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cape Town in 2018. She has published articles in Fashion Theory, International Journal for Fashion Studies, Africa è Mediterraneo, and other journals, and has chapters in Fashion and Politics, Slow Fashion, Creating African Fashion Histories, and more. Erica co-edited Rethinking Fashion Globalisation (Bloomsbury, 2021) with Dr. Sarah Cheang and Professor Yoko Takagi, and is an advisory board member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion and currently a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa.

About AFRI

The African Fashion Research Institute was founded in 2019 in South Africa by Lesiba Mabitsela and Dr Erica de Greef. Our work is shaped by the urgent and overdue need to remember, rethink, and rewrite fashion histories that speak to afro-centric ways of wearing, knowing, making, and styling often absent in fashion books, exhibitions, economies and imaginations. Our recent project follows folds, pleats and creases in African fashion as a route to (k)new narratives – spelt with a k, as these are known to us, but perhaps new/novel to others – and as forms of engagement with different communities, knowledge-makers and creatives across the continent. The Fold is supported the British Council and National Arts Art Council, South Africa and by pan-African partners and collaborators.