African Fashion, Global Style: Histories, Innovations, and Ideas You Can Wear Victoria L. Rovine 9780253014092

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

Victoria L. Rovine is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is author of Bogolan: Shaping Culture through Cloth in Contemporary Mali (IUP, 2008).

A blast of fresh air for the discipline, Rovine's book is a game changer. Her work on how African fashion tells stories will be sure to inspire debate and further research.

[A] meticulously researched, richly illustrated, and very readable book about African fashion design and designers, and the global circulation of style... "African Fashon, Global Style" is a timely addition to an emergent body of critical fashion scholarship that works to decenter the canon of Western fashion by deprovincializing the African continent as a fashion-producing region.Dec 2015

This lavishly produced and well written book brings African fashion created by designers on the continent and beyond into the center of fashion studies by offering substantive insights into a subject that until recently has been relegated to the margins of conventional fashion scholarship and media reporting.

Having successfully redened fashion innovation, Rovine sets a new standard for fashion studies, whether Western or African.

Despite the layered complexities of her subject, Rovine's analysis is sophisticated and clear, never convoluted. Much of Rovine's study comes out of individual face-to-face interviews with designers within the last 5-10 years, so much of the content is fresh and unique. This book would be a great introduction to those not at all familiar with African fashion, as well as an excellent read for those already well-versed in Africa's creative fashion output.