Heather Akou

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design

This chapter focuses on three collections of objects from Africa containing textiles, jewelry, and other dress-related objects, all held (at least in part) at Indiana University, which has a renowned African Studies program. Spanning the continent from Ghana to Somalia, these cases illustrate a range of collecting practices with various implication...

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums'...

Considered by some Muslims to be an oxymoron, Islamic fashion bears many similarities to Western fashion: rapid change, an emphasis on self-expression, and trends that represent deeper changes in society and technology. This chapter explores how Islamic fashion fits into the body of academic literature on fashion and anti-fashion, the infrastructur...

Secret societies such as the Freemasons and Odd Fellows were very popular in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This article explores how members of a little–known (but uniquely American) secret society for women—known as the Degree of Pocahontas—used regalia to carry out their rituals and to engage in abstrac...

В течение последнего года я изучала историю униформ, которые носят ра- ботники сферы услуг в Соединенных Штатах. В отличие от производства, где люди заняты изготовлением материальных товаров для рынка и мало взаимодействуют с клиентами лично, работникам сферы услуг приходится постоянно общаться, выступая в самых разных ролях. Среди них—врачи и медс...

Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies

Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies

Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies

With the United States having the highest rate of incarceration in the world—peaking in 2008 at 755 prisoners for every 100,000 residents—it is not surprising that American popular culture is saturated with images of prison. Although the experience of being in prison is associated with humiliation, punishment and a lack of choice (which is antithet...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, ‘essential workers’ in the United States – including nurses, delivery drivers, grocery clerks and waitresses – bore the brunt of extreme scepticism over public health measures such as lockdowns and wearing facemasks. Conflicting messages from the president, the Centers for Disease Control and state and local govern...

When the first cases of COVID-19 started showing up in the United States, the CDC and the Surgeon General argued that the general public should not wear masks because they were ‘ineffective’ and more desperately needed by healthcare workers. As states shut down and certain industries were declared ‘essential’ (grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware s...

In the 1920s and 1930s, missionaries and colonial officials in equatorial Africa collected thousands of amulets – devices worn on the body that were made locally for protection and healing (spiritual and/or physical). One of these collections – assembled in the 1920s by an American pseudo-missionary, Major John White – is now held at the Mathers Mu...

Since their invention in the 1930s, t-shirts have become one of the most common styles of casual clothing in the United States – worn by all ages, genders and social classes. Although ‘graphic’ t-shirts have existed for decades, twenty-first-century technologies have made them much faster and easier to produce. Students protesting the Vietnam War i...

Russian translation of an article originally published in 'Fashion Theory' (US Edition), "The Politics of Covering the Face: From the Burqa Ban to the Facekini"

Bibliographic Guide for Bloomsbury Fashion Central

In 2009, the French government established a commission to study the controversial practice among a minority of Muslim women of wearing the ‘voile integral’ (full-face veil). This led to the passage of a law the following year—widely referred to in the media as the ‘burqa ban’—designed to curtail what many lawmakers had described as a discriminator...

Full text available on the American Craft Council website: https://craftcouncil.org/post/elizabeth-sage-historic-collection

Although hijabis just one facet of Islam (and from a theological perspective, not the most important), many native-born converts in North America-especially women-appear to struggle with it: what to wear; what to think about hijab; how to make the transition and how it affects their interactions with non-Muslims, including employers, close friends...

The Berg Fashion Library is the ideal resource for teaching and researching dress and fashion. Bibliographic guides have been created to provide teachers, students and researchers with a concise overview of all the key readings and schools of thought within a particular disciplinary perspective. Structured thematically, these clear and accessible a...

Global Perspectives provides a transnational overview of dress within the global arena. "Intelligent" textiles and the impact of recent developments in nanotechnology are addressed alongside such popular culture phenomena as "cosplay," based on Japanese comics and animation, and virtual worlds, where avatars provide opportunities for multiple, shif...

When Somalia became an independent nation in 1960, the change in power was celebrated with new postage stamps. Departing from the royal portraits and vague images of "natives" favored by their colonizers, Somalis chose to circulate detailed images of local plants, animals, artisanal products, and beautiful young women in wrapped fabrics. In the ear...

Long Live The President! Portrait-Cloths from Africa was created as a catalogue for the exhibit, Long Live the President!, which was on display from 1 April to 22 August, 2010, at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The author, Paul Faber, is the senior curator of the museum’s ethnographic collection from Africa. The purposes of this ex...

The universal act of dressing - shared by both men and women, young and old, rich and poor, minority and majority - has shaped human interactions, communicated hopes and fears about the future, and embodied what it means to be Somali. Heather Marie Akou mines politics and history in this rich and compelling study of Somali material culture. Akou ex...

Hijab, the practice of modesty or "covering," is one of the most visible and controversial aspects of Islam in the twenty-first century, partly because the Qur'an offers so little guidance on proper dress. This forces Muslims to engage in ijtihad (interpretation), which historically has resulted in vast differences in dress around the world. By tra...

A growing body of literature points to the Internet as a place where Muslims are re-imagining themselves as part of a global, interconnected, religious culture—a new virtual umma. Along with issues such as politics, Islamic law, the interpretation of text, and procedures for rituals, hijab (modest dress) is a frequent topic of conversation. Compare...

African fashion is as diverse and dynamic as the continent and the people who live there. While experts have long recognized the importance of clothing as a marker of ethnic identity, life stages, political affiliation, and social class, they have only just begun to discover African fashion. Contemporary African Fashion puts Africa at the intersect...

Lavishly illustrated with over 300 images - most previously unpublished - Africa is the first major reference work to offer a comprehensive overview of dress and adornment in this vast continent of many nations and peoples. This volume examines past and present dress practices, including the ornamental and symbolic meaning of body decoration, the h...

Lavishly illustrated with over 300 images - most previously unpublished - Africa is the first major reference work to offer a comprehensive overview of dress and adornment in this vast continent of many nations and peoples. This volume examines past and present dress practices, including the ornamental and symbolic meaning of body decoration, the h...

Originally published in 2001 by the Smithsonian Institution, Bogolan provided a comprehensive presentation of bogolanfini, a type of cloth made in Mali using handwoven strips of cotton fabric as a canvas for black and white designs applied with plant dyes and dark mud. That edition of the book was awarded an "Honorable Mention" prize for single-aut...

The Essential Art of African Textiles was published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same name held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 30, 2008, to March 22, 2009. Along with honoring the acquisition of the textile/sculpture "Between Earth and Heaven" by the renowned Ghanaian artist El Anatsui—surely destined to be one of the mos...

Dress in Africa is highly complex, incorporating a vast array of natural and factory-made materials that are sometimes locally produced but also imported from all over the world. Clothing and body adornments are a critical part of the economy in many countries, used by men, women and children for artistic expression as well as to communicate identi...

This article critiques the concepts of "ethnic dress" and "world fashion" along with the common perception that there is only one world fashion system dominated by the West. A new framework—based on microcultures, cultures, and macrocultures—can allow us to recognize non-Western fashion systems that have a global reach. For example, Asian, African,...

At first, the title of this book seems to have too much sweep. Much of the literature on textiles and clothing in Africa has actually been about a few English-speaking, sub-Saharan countries like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa (a good example of this is Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff's Cloth, Dress, and Art Patronage in Africa [1999], wh...

Dress Sense explores the importance of the senses and emotions in the way people dress, and how they attach value and significance to clothing. Inspired by the work of Joanne B. Eicher, contributors offer different multi-disciplinary perspectives on this key and unexplored topic in dress and sensory anthropology. The essays present historical, cont...

This anthology is aimed at breaking down two sets of stereotypes that have limited scholarship on textiles and clothing. The first is a tendency in the West, and more specifically in academia, to view clothing as "intrinsically superficial" (p. 3). This is not a new observation, but Clothing as Material Culture does make a strong statement against...

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2005. Includes bibliographical references. Photocopy. "UMI number: 3179972."