Victoria Rovine's African Fashion, Global Style is an exciting and elegant publication which signals the arrival of a vital new sub-field in African art history: fashion studies. Being the first book-length study on this subject, it will resituate and reenergize our discipline for years to come; not only it is about a subject so fundamentally connected into people's daily lives and dreams but also the designers and brands presented here stand out as potent new icons of African art. They might even change how we see and what we see as contemporary African art.
Fashion matters—it really does. Rovine will bring into your classroom or living room the power of some superb African artists, their popular brands, and their sometimes eye-popping high-fashion creations. To highlight a very few, consider Amaka Osakwe, creator of Maki Oh, high priestess of the hyper-feminine, and the remarkable Hamidou Seydou Harira, both from Nigeria. From...