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Victoria Rovine , African Fashion, Global Style: histories, innovations, and ideas you can wear . Bloomington IN : Indiana University Press (pb US$40 - 978 0 253 01409 2 ). 2015, 315 pp.
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Victoria Rovine analyses a breath-taking number of 'African fashion's many manifestations' across the continent and the diaspora. Rather than just glossing over this abundance as in a 'survey format' (p. 50), African Fashion, Global Style presents an awe-inspiring intricacy of detail without being overwhelming to the reader (well, maybe a bit overwhelming - but in a good way). Rovine delves into the way that each designer transforms their own traditions, navigates the global market, and gives 'their garments [a] capacity to evoke emotions and events as well as cultures and places' (p. 156). Yet with all this immensity of scope and detail, Rovine still manages to weave her richly researched case studies into a coherent theoretical whole.
In an encyclopaedic review of the tradition/modernity, the West/the rest debates, Rovine encompasses and goes beyond Western fashion discourses. Situating fashion as the epitome of modernity and placing it exclusively in the West, these discourses 'reinforc[e] conceptions of Africa as distant, tradition-bound, and wholly separate from the high fashion cultures of Europe' (p. 245).
Rovine redefines fashion, structuring her book so as to restructure this vision. In story after story, she demonstrates that 'fashion is not defined by the proximity of clothing innovations...