Aso ebi : dress, fashion, visual culture, and urban cosmopolitanism in West Africa / Okechukwu Nwafor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nwafor, Okechukwu Charles.

Series:

African perspectives.

African perspectives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clothing and dress--Africa, West.

Clothing and dress.

Fashion--Africa, West.

Fashion.

Visual communication--Africa, West.

Visual communication.

Cosmopolitanism--Africa, West.

Cosmopolitanism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (253 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledments

Introduction. Aso Ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa

Chapter 1. Aso Ebi and the Fashioning of Bodies in Colonial Lagos, 1860s-1960s

Chapter 2. Cheaper Clothes in a Fluctuating Economy, 1960-2008

Chapter 3. Coloring Wealth, the Crowd, and Class

Chapter 4. Fractured Materiality and the Political Economy of Intimacy

Chapter 5. Framing the Mutual Life of Aso Ebi in Lagos: Copies, Copying, and Fashion Magazines

Chapter 6. Surfacist Aesthetics and the Digital Turn

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-233) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-472-12866-3

OCLC:

1243162548