Gallery of Poems collection, 2010
Jos Arts
Vlisco
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Whether poor or rich, people still
Many people believe that the Afr simple tastes who is ready to acc quality goods and clearing lines, garish colours, which the more fas This is far from the truth. Ray Butler
Having her own Dutch Wax is eve
need to communicate. Naguib Swiris
ican is a person of very ept all sort of second and crude designs and hionable nations reject.
ry woman’s dream. Ken Bugul
1 Dazzling Graphics collection, 2011
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2 Si tu sors, je sors, Noud Jeurgens, 1978
Preface At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch fabric manufacturer Vlisco put its factory-made batik on the African market for the first time. By 1960, deliveries of Real Dutch Wax had risen to 34 million yards. In West and Central Africa, the Vlisco brand (the name is always carefully woven into the selvedge) has now come to represent the height of luxury. At important functions and ceremonies, the preferred mode of dress is always Dutch Wax. Vlisco has become a major African fashion icon, and Africans regard Dutch Wax as part of their own cultural heritage. How did textiles that were designed in Helmond, the Netherlands, and manufactured using a technique born in Indonesia, grow into a symbol of African identity? This book is a detailed discussion of that very question. A typical aspect of African culture is that people are accustomed to recycling everything and to adapting products to suit their own taste. As we know, second-hand clothing and discarded tins are often reused there in innovative ways. The application of Dutch Wax, argues Jos Arts, must be seen in the same light: as a cultural improvisation in which clothing is given new value and meaning geared to the African situation. To a great extent the basis of Vlisco’s success lies in the fact that the company has developed a semi-manufactured product. The fabric may be designed and manufactured in Helmond, but the patterns do not acquire meaning until they get to Africa, in dialogue with market women and merchants. The wearer then transforms the fabric into a garment (alone or in consultation with a dressmaker) in which the
pattern is critical to the final silhouette. This process has continued unchanged for almost a century. In recent years, Vlisco has tried to respond to the wishes of a new generation of African women − modern, sophisticated women who are still intent on showing their African identity on certain occasions. Vlisco develops fashion textiles for them that change with the season, and in its flagship stores the company demonstrates the various models that can be made with these fabrics. Vlisco Fashion Academies train dressmakers to make these outfits. This is a fascinating new direction for Vlisco, the impact of which will be visible in the years to come. In 2009, third-year students in the fashion department of the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts designed a whole fashion collection based on fabrics by Vlisco. Fashion designers Junya Watanabe and Bernhard Willhelm have also recently used the striking and widely recognised Dutch wax designs in their collections. Vlisco made a name for itself in the world of art when Yinka Shonibare featured the wax textiles in his installations exposing the colonial history of the West. As a result, Vlisco has become increasingly well-known and popular in the Western world in recent decades. Vlisco has also become a household word in contemporary fashion research, as the literature list in the back of this book testifies. The Dutch Wax phenomenon is not something that can easily be pigeonholed under the classical concepts of colonial rule and dominance of Western fashion. What emerges from the Vlisco story is a unique interplay of cultures that radically alters our vision of what constitutes both a ‘national’ identity and habits of fashion and dress.
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Vlisco is seventh in a series of publications dealing with those Dutch fashion designers and companies that have been significant in the development of fashion, both in the Netherlands and around the world. The aim of ArtEZ Modelectoraat in issuing the series is to create a more comprehensive picture of Dutch fashion and design history. This text is based on extensive archival research and on interviews with key players and designers. The series also comprises monographs on Alexander van Slobbe, Oilily, Fong-Leng, Jan Jansen, Spijkers en Spijkers and Marlies Dekkers. The series is published in collaboration with ArtEZ Press.
JosĂŠ Teunissen Professor of Fashion Design, ArtEZ Institute of the Arts Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London
3 ABC – Alphabet ABC , Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1920
An African legend in stormy weather Panic in Helmond It all started with an alarming phone call. Followed by another. And another. And yet another. And all those phone calls carried the same message. In Benin, the NovemberDecember period is normally high season for the sale of clothing and fabrics. The holidays are around the corner so naturally everyone wants a new outfit, and there are Christmas presents to be bought. And what could be prettier than a Real Dutch Wax − a wax print cloth from the Dutch manufacturer Vlisco? The Dutch Wax, writes the Senegalese Ken Bugul in the French newspaper Libération, is a sign and symbol of fashion,1 of elegance. A woman’s 1
Here Ken Bugul effortlessly links the notion of ‘fashion’ with that of ‘Africa’. This is less straightforward than it seems. Sandra Niessen (2003) points out that fashion is still generally regarded by sociologists, anthropologists, art historians and cultural scientists as a specifically Western phenomenon that differs radically from the non-Western clothing system. Fashion, they say, stands for continuous and rapid change, for progress. The non-Western clothing system is regarded as unchanging, traditional and static. Jennifer Craik puts it this way: ‘The term fashion is rarely used in reference to non-Western cultures. The two are defined in opposition to each other: Western dress is fashion because it changes regularly, is superficial and mundane, and projects individual identity; non-Western dress is costume because it is unchanging, encodes deep meanings, and projects group identity and membership’ (Quoted in Rovine 2004, p. 191). Niessen calls for a revision of the definition of fashion that also includes non-Western clothing systems, a view that seems to be gaining increasingly broader adherence. For example, Karen Tranberg Hansen (2004, p. 370) comes to the conclusion that fashion is no longer the exclusive domain of the West, and in the special African Fashion / African Style issue of the magazine Fashion Theory an attempt was made to demonstrate that fashion is not endemic to the Western world alone (Rovine 2009, p. 137). Also see Eicher and Sumberg (1995), Brand and Teunissen (2006) and Gott and Loughran (2010).
wardrobe, she says, is not complete without a few garments made from Dutch Wax, which makes it a frequent topic of discussion among many women in West and Central Africa, including Bugul herself − and she’s the first to admit it (Bugul 2010). Tom Mbakwe even dares to argue that for many African women, Dutch Wax is as important as the Bible is for Christians (Mbakwe 2002), while Anne Grosfilley sees Dutch Wax as a luxury product that carries the same status as French perfume (Grosfilley 2004, p. 32). A Congolese man with marriage in mind must bring gifts for the family of his bride-to-be when he comes calling, preferably a couple of wax prints. If his gifts are not Vlisco products − or more precisely, not Superwax − he is not taken seriously.2 But in December 2004 in the open-air markets of Cotonou and Porto-Novo in Benin, Dutch Wax suddenly seemed to have lost its popularity. At least that was the gist of the phone calls coming in to Eric Loko, Vlisco’s country manager in Benin, where a large portion of the African Vlisco fabrics were shipped for further distribution. The wholesalers, middlemen, market vendors, stylists and boutique owners − all of them complained that sales had plummeted in comparison with the year before, something that Loko 2
Interview with Odia Kabakele, Kinshasa, 16 March 2011. The importance that is attached to fabrics and clothing in Africa has to do with the fact that fabrics were used as a means of exchange before the introduction of coins. In many areas, expensive fabrics have traditionally been a sign of wealth, status and prestige, and the owning and wearing of quality fabrics are uniquely feminine ways of expressing affluence (Perani and Wolf 1999, p. 34; Rabine 2002, p. 30; Gott 2010, p. 19).
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Snailskin – Peau de léopards – Nkoi Nkoi, Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1922 4
Big Step – Staircase – L’escalier – Owu atwere (Death’s ladder which everyone will 5 climb – Ghana), Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1927