Traditional Gambian Fashion

Fashion styles differ from country to country and you can usually tell by a person’s clothes as to which part of the world they come from. However, a lot of people cross these cultural borders and choose to wear the style they like the best. Ritva Lundberg, from Sweden, is a non-conformist when it comes to Swedish fashion, since she usually dresses in West African clothes. She loves tie-dye fabrics and knows a lot about the way they are produced. During the hippie-era in the 1970’s, when batik clothes were trendy in Sweden and other parts of the western world, Ritva made her own batik fabrics, however, today she usually buys her fabrics from Gambia.

The first time I met Ritva Lundberg was in Bakau in Gambia in 2002. I was there as a tourist and Ritva, who had been living there periodically for three years, became my guide to the country and introduced me to her friends. It was the interest in West African music that drew Ritva and her husband to Gambia in 1999 and they immediately fell in love with the culture. They spend a few months in Gambia every year, bringing its culture and way of life back to Sweden when they return, for example, Ritva often dresses in African fabrics in Sweden but in clothes made with western designs. It is still quite unusual in Sweden to wear this kind of fabric and it is easy to spot Ritva in a crowd. It is always exciting to see her choice of clothing, as she is literally wearing a piece of beautiful art.
“I always receive compliments on my style of clothing and my colleagues say that it is fun, as I add a splash of colour to the workplace, since the Swedish people usually dress so colourless”. The clothes in Gambia, on the other hand, are known for being very colourful and they are often made through tie-dye.

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Ritva Lundberg at one of her art vernissages in Sweden.

“Cuub” is the word for tie-dyed clothes in Wolof, one of the main tribe languages in Gambia. Ritva tells me that cuub is the traditional way to decorate clothes and when you walk the streets of Gambia you see a lot of people wearing those patterns. Originally the Gambian people used plant colours to create the batik and the patterns were usually quite small. Nowadays, the colours are synthetic and patterns, colours and techniques are numerous, but the old patterns are still used and popular, beside the new ones.

This is three examples of Gambian tie-dye fabrics

Ritva Lundberg loves the colourfulness and the diversity in the Gambian fabrics and explains that there are thousands of colour combinations and patterns. When I visited a market in Banjul with her, it was the colours of clothing that made the greatest impression on me. Ritva usually buys her printed cotton fabrics at the big markets in Banjul or in the markets of Serrekunda since they have the largest assortment. However, the batik clothes she prefers to buy are from a batik maker named Fatou Sanneh.”I happened to get a good price from her once at the market in Serrekunda, where I gradually became her regular customer and started to visit her home to do my shopping”. Fatou also makes batik on order so you can get exactly the colours and patterns you want. “However, her prices for the special ordered batik patterns are not as low, but on the other hand, her fabrics are of extremely high quality”.

Fatou Sanneh is one of many batik makers in Gambia. Here she and her brother is showing one of her fabrics.

I have learnt that the pattern of the fabric is very important and Ritva says that there are new imaginative patterns invented all the time. There is also a trend in patterns and every year there is a pattern that is the “it” thing. “Every fabric manufacturer produces the pattern and all fashion conscious women wear it. If they don’t they are not ‘in’. You can not go to a party wearing last year’s batik pattern. That is unthinkable.” Ritva Lundberg says that trends are very important in Gambia and that the Gambian women love vanity and new clothes. “It should always be the latest trends, sewed by the favourite tailor”. At the moment however, the batik patterned clothes are starting to be pushed out by a new “in” thing. “Today the latest fashion is sparkling synthetic fabrics, often with lace and inventive embroiders.”

Another interesting thing about the clothing in Gambia is that the women usually dress in the same patterns for big family feasts. “The women wear something called ‘asobi’, a kind of uniform, where the clothes are made out of the same patterned fabric, however, the design can vary. Sometimes even the men get an asobi in the same pattern, but this is not that common”. It is custom that the family who hosts the party buys all the fabric for the guests’ clothes. The choice of the fabric indicate the level of wealth of the family.

At Gambian family feasts the women usually dress in 'asobi', clothes made out of the same patterned fabric.

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For all of you who don’t have the opportunity to go to West Africa to buy these beautiful fabrics, it is possible to buy it online from stores such as Indigo Arts and Saramani Tissus.

A big thanks to Ritva Lundberg for the information and the photos used in this post.

Creating trends

I have always wondered who or what it is that decides what is trendy. When I was younger, I thought it was the girly magazines that made this important decision. My friends and I used to read the top ten lists of what is in and what is not to make sure we didn’t show up with something that was totally out of fashion. At that time, following trends were looked upon as very important, at least among my friends and classmates, but it wasn’t just us that had to follow these trend rules, it was our parents too.

I bet you all have old photos of your parents that you at some point in life have felt quite embarrassed about. For me, one of those is a photo of my mom in a fake leopard coat, shot in the 1970’s. I found that coat in our basement store when I was in high school and stuffed it into a black plastic bag, hiding it well just to make sure she wouldn’t wear it in public again. At that time leopard patterned fabrics was looked upon as “a big no no” and it was always mentioned in the magazine articles as “Trends we never want to see again”. Finally, that leopard coat was given away to charity when we cleaned our basement store and I made it clear that I absolutely didn’t want to inherit it.

When I was nineteen I started to dance Arabic dance and made a lot of new friends from the Middle East. In this dance culture, trends were totally different from the common trends in the Swedish society, for example, leopard patterns were looked upon as really cool. The first time, I saw one of my friends arrive to a party in a leopard patterned cat suit and I was quite shocked about her choice of clothing. Soon I realized that she wasn’t the only one wearing that pattern, almost everyone in the group did. A few weeks later when I went out shopping with one of my friends, who wasn’t in the dance group, I spotted a leopard top that I really liked. I showed it to my friend and she asked me if I was insane. However, I decided to buy it because I liked it and in my opinion it was trendy. At that time I had stopped slaving under the fashion magazines and wore what I liked. According to the fashion magazines my friends and I were totally untrendy, but we didn’t care.

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I really like leopard patterns...but sometimes it can be a little bit too much.

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Last weekend I attended a concert to see my idol Tori Amos, where she wore a leopard cat suit. I have seen her wearing the outfit in photos before and I obviously wasn’t the only one who had. The audience was full of girls wearing leopard outfits. When Tori Amos sang the phrase “I'm boycotting trends, it's my new look this season”, from the track Girl Disappearing, it came clear to me what impact artists have in creating trends. Maybe she is totally untrendy according to the fashion magazines but her style was as trendy as could be for us. Trends are not only created by designers or fashion magazines. It is also created by communities, idols and a lot of other factors. Referring to my last blog post, Emmelie answers my question about what fashion is: “It's a shallow way to show off who I am”. If I could turn back the time, I would never have given away my mom’s leopard coat. It would have been so cool to wear it this autumn, not because it’s the ‘in’ thing according to the fashion magazines, but because I really like it.

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Tori Amos in a leopard catsuit at the concert in Madison Square Garden.

What is fashion?

I found this video at YouTube and it presents some interesting answers to the question I have been thinking about all week: What is fashion? I haven’t figured out my answer to that question yet. Instead, I will share some of my favorite explanations from the video with you:

“Fashion is having fun with clothes”
“Fashion is your own style”
“Fashion is art you wear”
“Fashion anticipates, and elegance is a state of mind… a mirror of the time in which we live, a translation of the future, and should never be static.” / Oleg Cassini

And of course I found some explanations that I don’t agree with. Two of them are:

“If you are not in fashion, you are nobody” / Lord Chesterfield
“We live not according to reason, but according to fashion” / Seneca

So my question to all of you is: What is fashion to you?

One more fashion blog?

The fashion blogs first appeared in the blogosphere in 2002 and the phenomenon has grown considerably since then. Today, the Internet is crowded with people from around the world writing about fashion, but what are they really reporting about? According to Wikipedia, the fashion bloggers usually cover things such as runway trends, fashion items, celebrity fashion and street style. However, my personal opinion is that many of those blogs appear to exist primarily to satisfy the bloggers narcissistic needs, rather than to share thoughts and knowledge about fashion. At least most of the Swedish blogs mainly consist of posts with photos in which the bloggers show their outfits of the day and let the readers know which fancy stores they have bought the clothes from. To me these bloggers seem to be attention-seeking people with an extreme need of encouragement from other people…and they get it. It is almost as if the fashion bloggers have gathered together in a big “complementing each other” group. Furthermore, my observation is that you often don’t get comments about your posts because you have written something interesting, but because you have made a lot of comments in other people’s blogs. It is kind of an elementary school mentality; if you write a comment to me telling that I have nice clothes, I will write a comment to you telling the same. I know that making comments is a way of marketing yourself and your blog, but what do these bloggers really want to market?

As you might already have figured out, I don’t plan to be one of these fashion bloggers. So if you are here looking for tips about the absolute coolest trends and must-have accessories for this autumn I would advise you to look somewhere else. In this blog I am going to cover fashion from all around the world. My intention is to write about different aspects of fashion and share my thoughts about the industry because fashion and clothes aren’t just about products, designs or shopping, it is about so much more.