Fashion Accounts is an installation series at Museum Africa that reimagines how we collect, archive, and remember through fashion objects. It's curated by South African fashion designer and artist Wanda Lephoto, fashion curator and academic Erica de Greef, and London-based fashion curator and researcher Alison Moloney in response to the absence of black South African fashion histories within museum collections.
This exhibition confronts colonial legacies within fashion collections and highlights the gaps in whose stories are preserved. Through a diverse array of pieces, it explores memory, resistance, and preservation, showcasing the complexities of beauty and trauma embedded in historical fashion.
Museum Africa holds a rich ethnographic collection with 14,000 items and a photographic archive of 11,000 images capturing the country's people, places, and history. The Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection is another highlight, featuring about 16,000 fashion items, mostly European and white-owned, imported or locally made, from the mid-1700s to early 2000s. This includes shoes, buttons, dresses, suits, and military attire, among other items. Contemporary artists and collectives working within the realm of fashion, Thebe Magugu, Sindiso Khumalo, The Sartists, and Ncumisa 'Mimi' Duma, also have work in this exhibition.
Despite the vastness of these collections, there are notable gaps in whose stories are told and preserved. The fashion items, seemingly simple at first glance, hold complex histories – showcasing both beauty and trauma. They reveal colonial power structures and provide an opportunity to bring forward Afrocentric stories that have been overlooked.
Fashion Accounts is open to the public from Fri, Nov 15, 2024 – Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at Museum Africa in Newtown.
