D = Dashiki

D= Dashiki

I am asked to do some projects that I consider rather a cliche. In this instance, I was commissioned to create a dashiki. I used the square, circle, and triangle methods. The client creates the brief, the square. I create the circle of collaborators, and then the triangle connects all creative ideas. Here we go, folks...

The dashiki has a complex history. As a garment, it has become a visual and textural archive of the past and legacies of African American people. Receiving a commission to recreate the garment, I started by examining how it came to America and became the symbol of the Black Power movement.

On March 1, 1961, President John Kennedy established the Peace Corps. In his statement, he said, “Every young American who participates in the Peace Corps — who works in a foreign land — will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.”

The dàń?íkí, a Yoruba word from the Hausa word for “shirt,” was bought from Nigeria and other West African countries by Americans who traveled there with the Peace Corps. This traditional garment is a square loose-fitting shirt with a V-shaped collar and features a signature design, the “Angelina print,” produced by the Dutch Company Vilsco.

In 1967, Jason Benning, African American Studies teacher (then called Negro Studies) at Queens College, created a variation of this shirt and called it the dashiki. He and his wife, Mable, a seamstress, and Howard Davis, a patternmaker, established New Breed Clothing Ltd. in Harlem, New York. They refashioned the African tunic in high-end fabric, with a large scoop neck, a kangaroo-style pocket, and two smaller pockets below the waist.

Designers like New Breed subjected the garment to a constant process of refinement and transformation. They recontextualized it in response to changing circumstances and political strategies in the struggle for African American equality during that time. The original work shirt was “anti-fashion.” Its creators recognized that it was a political garment about the African American experience in response to enslavement in America and the formulation of the African American identity.

Howard Davis spoke about the New Breed in August 2017 with Michelle Millar Fisher, curatorial assistant in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design:

“It was the political aspects of it, I think, especially for young people today, knowing what it meant when you put this dashiki on your body. Other than just being a garment, you must understand what and where it came from and why it’s important to the African American community. And I learned about things that I did not know about our history. We had done some very deep research work for that.”

Today, dashikis are knockoffs of the original garment produced in China. The current incarnation of the garment has a wide lens that allows distance and abstraction rather than the humanity of a person or a people. Its focus is the vague place of “Africa” and Africa-ness. The perspective of the individual is absent.

Working with the Angelina print revealed graphic similarities to the Brooks Slave Ship; I explored this more in the narrative I created by connecting it to Yoruba people from Nigeria and Benin. They represented the largest community of enslaved who were forcibly transported to America on the Middle Passage.

In “Committed to Memory” by Cheryl Finley, she references an eighteenth-century engraving of the Brookes Slave Ship cargo hold, calling it the “Slave Ship Icon.” It is a recognizable image of the Middle Passage and shows the inhumanity of slavery and the journey of enslaved Africans to America.

“The slave ship icon has remained a persistent phenomenon in contemporary culture here in the United States and throughout the black Atlantic. It appears with remarkable frequency in fashion, film, and digital media as well as in works of fine art. This enduring image served to galvanize the formation of African diaspora identity and aesthetic practice in the second half of the twentieth century and today in a process that hinges on a ritualized politics of remembering.”

I wanted to explore American-ness in this piece with an African narrative. I eliminated the tunic shape and chose a ready-made garment — the sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was once athletic wear and is now widespread in Streetwear Fashion — a ubiquitous, distinctly American item worn globally.

The Angelina print was printed on the garment using Puff ink that, once heated, slightly raises. The pattern appeared like scars, mimicking Yoruba tribal scarification, a specific identification designed on the face or body. The tribal marks are used to identify a person’s tribe or family.

Artist Nastassja Ebony handcrafted felt black faces that were applied to add the missing component from both the Slave Ship Icon image and the dashiki. The faces represent the enslaved as humans, as people, ancestors.

Recontextualizing this garment, I had powerful ideas on how it should function politically and aesthetically. Focusing the design narrative on a specific people to a particular place and moment on an American garment is a response to changing circumstances and political strategies to define the uniquely African American histories and experiences. This commission became a worn historical ledger; I recognized that it is still a political garment. Now it was one with a deeper, specific more personal narrative.

Let the collaboration continue.

There is very little information about New Breed, so I must thank the sources:

“The revolution will wear a dashiki,” by Khanya Mtshali.?www.khanyakhondlomtshali.com

The revolution will wear a dashiki

How a 1960s Harlem couple popularized Afrocentric fashion and built a community where black power thrived

timeline.com

The New Breed-fashion-boutique?by Dave Tomlinson

Talking about New Breed with Howard Davis

This fantastic book “Committed to Memory” by Cherly Finley, a Distinguished Visiting Professor Department of Art & Visual Culture

Please support and follow Sculpture and Fiber Artist www.nastassjaswift.com, and her instagram is @natassjaebony

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