From the wrapped and draped fabrics of precolonial Fon dress to the widespread custom clothing industry of the late twentieth century, Benin's tailors have built both rich traditions of artisanal skill and a storied history of innovation. Their work and expertise clothe everyday life, and in doing so contribute to shifting notions of status, identity, and power in the cities and towns of southern Benin. Tailoring Identities reveals the rich history behind the gendered and occupational identities of Benin's craftspeople and how their mastery over the material world positioned them as experts in style and sartorial meaning. Drawing on archival records from Benin, the United States, France, and Senegal and connecting them with oral histories, local material archives, and insights from her own apprenticeship with a Beninois master seamstress, Elizabeth Ann Fretwell demonstrates how West African tailors became important technological and cultural agents. By combining and repurposing tools, techniques, and material inputs from African and non-African sources and refining their craft through long-standing regional practices of innovation and collaboration, tailors consistently created groundbreaking fashions while giving form to political and social change. Shifting conversations about African fashion from its aesthetics, authenticity, and consumption toward the making of garments and the development of craft knowledge, Tailoring Identities opens new artisanal pathways into the interdisciplinary study of fashion and clothing, technology, and urban social history.
Elizabeth Ann Fretwell is Assistant Professor of African History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She received her PhD from University of Chicago and has previously published in Radical History Review, History and Technology, and the Journal of Urban History.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Tailoring Identities 1. Wrapped and Draped: Making Clothing in the Dahomey Kingdom 2. Fitting Changes: The Sartorial Economy and the Tailored Silhouette 3. Tailoring Men: Mobility, Modernity, and Men's Fashion in the Era of Independence 4. The Material Culture of Expertise: Artisanal Ways of Knowing, Apprenticeship, and the Professionalization of Craft 5. Feminizing the Craft: The Urban Workshop, Women's Space, and Respectable Dress Conclusion: Tailoring in the Twenty-First Century Glossary Notes Bibliography Index
"Tailoring Identities stands out significantly in its field. Unlike most books on African dress, it delves into how local tailors navigate the bureaucratic networks of state institutions and how these interactions influence urban development and shape the social lives of ordinary citizens. This book fills that critical gap, illustrating how tailors and fashion enthusiasts have continually adapted their craft to the everchanging political, economic, and social landscapes of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. By exploring the complex history of cloth-making, it offers fresh insights into the origins of production methods, work patterns, and occupational identities, as well as the enduring popularity of certain styles in Benin. . . . I don't know of any other book that does that."-Okechukwu Nwafor, author of Aso Ebi: Dress, Fashion, Visual Culture, and Urban Cosmopolitanism in West Africa "This is a major contribution to the literature of fashion in West Africa and to the history of Dahomey and Benin specifically. It is, as far as I am aware, one of the few surveys of an area in West Africa that successfully covers hundreds of years of sartorial history. Fretwell's arguments are significant both to understanding the history of this specific area but also as a model for studies in other areas."-Elisabeth L. Cameron, author of Art of the Lega
