Threads of memory: Fashion Accounts exhibition opens at Museum Africa

What happens when we dig deep in the “Other” archives?

When do we remember the brilliance of what was tucked away in history?

This piece delves into the stories of fashioning selfhood and societies from forgotten corners of Mzansi, exploring how fashion thinking serves as a technology to critique practices and rituals of collecting, archiving, and memorializing. It becomes a portal to other dimensions of existence through dress—those often lost in translation. The notion that Africa only passed down history orally, as if she had not done so visually, is a fallacy this work challenges.

Erica de Greef, Wanda Lephoto, and Alison Moloney embarked on a quest of ukulanda’ umlando weyndwango zika mAfrika (retrieving the history woven into the fabric of Africa). What follows is an exploration of their exhibition and the insights these curators share.

Fashion Accounts is a series of installations that explore and challenge the practices and rituals of collecting, archiving and memorialising through dress. Curated by Wanda Lephoto, Erica de Greef, and Alison Moloney, the exhibition delves into the rituals of memory, resistance, and preservation. Featuring new commissions by The Sartists and Mimi Duma, alongside works by Thebe Magugu and Sindiso Khumalo, this exhibition addresses the legacies of colonial museum practices and the material cultures they have collected, stored and preserved.

Among the collections at Museum Africa is an ethnographic collection with 14,000 items and a photographic archive containing 11,000 images that provide a historical perspective on the country’s people, places and progress. The Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection, a significant part of the museum collection, comprises around 16,000 predominantly European, white-owned fashion objects imported into South Africa or locally made. This collection spans from the mid-1700s to the early 2000s and includes shoes, buttons, hats, ties, day and evening dresses, suits, military attire, christening gowns, wedding and mourning dresses, and more. Despite the scale of these collections, there are significant gaps regarding whose stories, dress histories and lived experiences have been collected and preserved.

The seemingly “innocent” objects in the fashion collections are deeply problematic, embodying both moments of beauty and traces of trauma. These items reflect the colonial power structures that once served as tools of oppression, yet they also offer a means to surface Afrocentric memories and stories often left untold.

“It is in the gaps, the absences, the fragments that we need to look to find ourselves when our stories are not acknowledged in the record” says co-curator Wanda Lephoto.

Co-curator Erica de Greef explains that “there is an urgent need to decolonise museums and their classification and representation practices.” She adds, “Fashion objects in museum collections offer powerful visual and material pathways for remembering more diverse South African histories, identities and subjectivities.”

“Fashion Accounts is both an account of fashion practices, historic and contemporary, which represent resistance and liberation and a stage to hold fashion to account as a tool of colonialism” says co-curator Alison Moloney.

Fashion Accounts documents the ongoing collaboration between South African fashion designer and artist Wanda Lephoto, London-based fashion curator and researcher Alison Moloney, and South African fashion curator and academic Dr Erica de Greef. Together, they confront the violent absence of black South African fashion histories within museum collections. They have worked closely with the museum’s existing display props and materials to make these tools, limitations, and challenges visible.

Here is Dr Erica de Greef with more info:

The exhibition opened to the public from November 15, 2024, to February 28, 2025, at Museum Africa, 121 Lilian Ngoyi St, Newtown, Johannesburg.

Museum opening times: Tuesday to Sunday, 09:00 – 17:00.
Entrance is free.
Parking is available on Mary Fitzgerald Square.

The exhibition is funded by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, with support from the French Institute of South Africa, the City of Johannesburg, and Museum Africa.

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