Of purple carpets and African royalty

Pop culture has asked this question many times. First it was vampires. Then zombies. What next? It would be safe to say we are smack in the superhero era. The world belongs to Marvel and DC Comics. The rest of us just live in it. The most anticipated movie of 2018 has without a doubt been Black Panther. An all black cast, powerful black superhero who is not a villain - yet, with animation iterations and an appearance in Avengers,

African female warriors, Lupita and the backdrop of what America has turned into makes it all far too mouth watering. African Americans are so protective of their legacy it is impossible to know what qualifies as cultural appropriation sometimes until the line is crossed.

But the line was drawn beautifully on the purple carpet during the Hollywood premier of Black Panther. Lupita Nyong’o in Atelier Versace, a fascinating choice not just because it is purple and her stylist Micaela Erlanger said they had selected it before they knew the carpet would be purple, but it is very much tied into pop culture with the recent premier of American Crime Story: Assassination of Gianni Versace, a show riddled with epic 90s style, and likely to influence runways in the next year.

It is a choice far more profound than it appears at first glance. Janelle Monae was another star in designer Christian Siriano, a designer who has a reputation for making plus sized women, or basically any woman who does not fit the standardised fashion template, beautiful. He has made quite a name for himself by dressing women with just as much flair as any atelier.

We have seen the Black Panther trailers. The purple carpet with a theme dubbed as royalty, was not simply about reclaiming African legacy. It is about a celebration of a culture suppressed by political leanings. The movie itself is right at the cusp of fashion, art and culture.

Costume designer Ruth E. Carter has been twice nominated for an Oscar and worked on Amistad, Roots and Selma. Her stunning regal Afrofuturistic sketches appeared in her January 31, 2018 interview with Forbes. The woman who grew up with five brothers and familiar with the comics said she had to bring ancient Africa into the foreground by imagining a country that was never colonised by the British or Dutch.  In came Afropunk and Afrofuturistic fashion.

Keeping in mind the 60s that she says were “ ... not so much a fashion as it a political statement, about freedom of expression, being unapologetic about who you are and how you adorn yourself.” While she was inspired by designers such as Stella McCartney and Gareth Pugh, she added “ ….. the Masai, the Suri tribe, the Northern African Tuareg. The oxidised red clay, the vibrant colours of Africa. You can look at these beautiful history books, at what they did, and you can translate it, seamlessly, to a futuristic model.” She designed T’Challa’s suit with what she calls the Okavango pattern. One she describes as similar to the Sacred Geometry of ancient Africa where she infused the pyramid. A triangle much used in African art especially in Mali and Botswana. 

I got tagged on a twitter thread with a wishlist of brilliant African designers who could have dressed the Black Panther stars. It was a great conversation piece. The challenge though is this. Hollywood, we have observed the past few months, is nothing if not a small cliquey family. When Lupita’s stylist Erlanger came to Kenya she explained they want to dress Lupita in African and Kenyan designers. But they do not have solid digital footprints. Missing websites, social media accounts, email addresses and phone number broke the link into what could have been a transformational moment.

Tragic considering a costume designer in Hollywood is able to draw inspiration from part of our culture yet our own designers rarely ever tap into our own cultural background. Here is the worst part. Kenya hastily and prematurely passed the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions Act in September 2016. We are the only country in the world that has done this. It is not a point of pride. The act locks out any use of our own cultural history, penalising anyone who so much as attempts to reimagine the past. Yes, that includes we, the people whose culture this is. Not only that, traditional knowledge is still an international debate the world is yet to grasp, define and understand. As an overreaction to the kiondo, kikoi and khanga appropriation it also qualifies as bad law.

Wakanda, fictional it may be, will inspire runways. It further opens up conversations around female bodies and how they are portrayed not just in fashion, but in comics. The kingdom of Wakanda is utopian but in a sense it illustrates a South Africa on apartheid lockdown, forced to lean into their art, cultural, literature and fashion muscles. The beauty of internal influence. Contrast it with Kenyans infernal and external inspirations and it is absence of who we are that kicks butt the most.