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The runway show has become paradigmatic of late twentieth- centuryspectacle; it has the potential to project imaginary worlds and aesthetic ideals, to set standards of taste and of distinction, and to simultaneously incite desire and controversy to various degrees. The term catwalk often calls to mind the extravagant productions associated with the semiannual fashion weeks of New York, Paris, London, and Milan. In these settings, the runway show is arguably inextricable from the commercial realm and functions as a tool with which designers seek the favorable attention of buyers, editors, trendsetters, and bloggers, all toward a common underlying goal: to sell clothing. In this essay, however, I aim to address how the deployment of the fashion show in a different context can involve a multiplicity of ambitions and outcomes. Specifically, I look at the politics of value that underlie the commodification of culture vis-à-vis a fashion show I attended in Windhoek, the capital city of postapartheid Namibia.
In 2010, the year marking Namibia's twentieth as a nation independent from South Africa, the Franco Namibian Cultural Center (FNCC) and the National Arts Council of Namibia (NACN) sponsored a fashion and photography event titled Himba in the Mix. The main attraction was a fashion show featuring the work of seven young female Namibian designers, who created eighteen explicitly contemporary ensembles inspired by the culture of the Ovahimba people, who are one of at least ten recognized ethnic groups in Namibia today. A local newspaper described the event as the first of its kind in the country. Its kind refers to the somewhat paradoxical fact that its organizers chose the definitively "modern" mediums of fashion and the catwalk to celebrate "traditional" culture (Kapitako 2010). The present-day Himba are the descendants of Herero pastoralists who remained in northwest Namibia while others migrated southward in the eighteenth century. They have maintained relations with "external" (that is, non-native African) influences at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the first hunters and traders from Cape Town arrived in northern Namibia. It is believed that the Herero had originally migrated to what is now southern Angola and northern Namibia in the sixteenth century (Katjavivi 1988). Those who continued southward encountered European settlers and began working in their homes. Converted to...