No doubt that almost all African women are naturally beautiful. For that matter, all women anywhere in the world are beautiful, however beauty is defined. Every woman is beautiful indeed. According to a recent blog post on women’s beauty, “Recent studies have shown that nearly symmetrical faces are considered highly attractive; we rate faces that are symmetrical as more attractive.” The idea of symmetry as a manifestation of beauty is also evident in Aristotle’s definition. For Aristotle, beauty is symmetry. According to Aristotle in his work entitled Metaphysics, “Beauty could be measured. Literally, the chief forms of beauty are order, symmetry, and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences all demonstrate in a special degree.”
There is no uniform consensus as to what a woman’s beauty is. According to some observers, “true beauty comes from a woman acknowledging her own needs, setting healthy boundaries, and going after her life’s ambitions with boldness and enthusiasm. Her beauty lies in acknowledging her uniqueness and shining her light while empowering others to shine as well.
Our modern conception of a woman’s beauty differs from traditional views in the sense that these days, the criteria for knowing how a woman is beautiful take others parameters into consideration. According to one view on the subject, the following points should be taken into consideration when we are evaluating the beauty of the modern woman in Africa or elsewhere in the world. A modern woman should be physically fit, keeps clean and well kept, has nice hair styles, big smile, bright eyes, happy disposition, and should be somewhat reserved but a little crazy at times. According to the same opinion, a beautiful woman should wear no or little makeup and should be open-mended and ready to accept her flaws, among other things.
There is also a divine or godly dimension that makes a woman beautiful. “Her godly attitudes, words and behavior make her beautiful. Godliness is not as noticeable as our clothing or jewelry. But is it “very precious” to God. He notices and cares! And godliness is beautiful because of its influence on others.”
For African women and women elsewhere in the world, the pursuit of fashion, designs and styles has become an integral part of their search for beauty or for caring about their beauty. For many women in Africa, the present motto seems to be, “You are what you wear!” or “You look what you wear”. A woman’s beauty is magnified when she wears goods and looks good in her chosen outfits. As the way a woman dresses defines the contours of her beauty, so fashion defines her choices and her searches for beauty or acceptance.
By the way, African women started to be concerned with their dressings, fashion or design relatively lately after some of the more beautiful girls among them were featured on the front pages of prominent fashion and design magazines in Europe or America. This has obviously inspired the rest of them to seek fame and fortune by joining fashion and design houses and acting as models for glossy publications. Naomi Campbell and others were among the most prominent ones.
However, African women have been always caring about their looks, their dresses, and their cosmetic choices, even long before modernity downed on them. So, fashion is not a new phenomenon among African women who have always been keen to look beautiful beyond what nature has bestowed them with.
According to available information, traditional African clothing consisted of natural materials. “The first forms of clothing were bark cloth, furs, skins, and hides, and the rest of the body adorned with beautification marks and color pigments. Males simply wrap the bark cloth that passed between the legs over a belt. Similarly, women draped the cloth over the belt to hide the front of their bodies.”
For many modern African women, fashion has become one of the most creative and fascinating fields of art and expression. It is a form of art and skill where one can use their own unique imagination and skills to create new styles, trends, and outfits. Fashion is best described as the style or styles of pairing clothes in a classy and unique way.
In Africa, fashion and designing may look like writing the African novel or painting the African portrait, which can be global in form but African in content. Content precedes form. There is some philosophical element in all this. What comes first, matter or spirit? form or content? Or is it the other way around? It sounds like “the egg or hen first?” dilemma. Who comes first? How do clothes look, or how are they conceived, and with what materials they are produced?
In the modern world, what we wear reflects not only how women look but also defines their identities. You can toss and turn jeans one hundred times as a possible fashion material or fabric, but it will never turn out to be African because jeans are American or Western. You can produce an African fashion with African material and give it an African expression. Africa has its own ideas of what clothes should look like or what should go into creating their identity.
In Africa as elsewhere in the world, the clothing industry and fashion industry are not one and the same. It is important to make a distinction between the two. “Fashion design deals more with the generation of ideas whereas the clothing industry produces the garments that are generated from the design ideas.” Designing in the fashion industry consists of creating, fashioning, executing or producing according to plan. What they call “the seven elements of design are, form, shape, line, color, texture, typography and space.”
Fashion or designer clothing are not the exclusive domain of wealthy, educated and pretty African women, although, “A growing middle class in Africa has money to spend on clothes and are taking an increasing interest in what they were. Africa’s wealthy elite is also growing, and the continent is one of the fastest growing market for luxury goods. That’s particularly the case in Nigeria, where a fashion-conscious population is enjoying a high economic growth rate, but many other countries in Africa are experiencing a rise in both wealth and interest in fashion.”
Maybe a reorientation in African and Ethiopian fashion design and production could be as another catalyst for expansion could be a timely move. Instead of focusing on the wealthy elites in Africa and across the world, the industry could cater to members of the lower classes with lower incomes so that they could enjoy the beauty and bounty inherent in African culture and arts.
The fashion industry can also take a cue from its Chinese counterparts where different standards are designed and implemented so that consumers in different income brackets can benefit from the varieties of apparels brought to the market. In this way most people would be turned into consumers rather than being simple observers without the means of buying what their hearts are desiring.
Focusing only on elite consumers not only narrows down the potentials of the market but also marginalizes potentially the most critical consumers, i.e., the hundreds of millions of potentially young consumers living in the countryside who massively migrate to the cities and towns in search of better opportunities. New and popular fashion brands should also be encouraged to flourish, which has so far been languishing in the margins for lack of investment as well as fresh ideas.
The main issue in Ethiopian fashion or design nowadays mainly boils down to the question of how to transform traditional apparels into modern ones without losing their original appeal or by adding new features that emphasize their uniqueness or particularity. How to modernize Ethiopian clothing, which is “typically made of bright and colorful fabrics, and many Ethiopian dresses are adorned with intricate beadworks.”
In Ethiopia, a new generation of fashion-savvy young fashion inventors is feeding the fashion industry, and parallel to this, a new, young, and beautiful group of Ethiopian designers have emerged at the height of the economic boom that allowed consumers to enjoy their own traditional clothing presented in new and fashionable forms that reflect the ever-changing global fashion world.
Parallel to this process, growing populations of beautiful, shapely African young women are increasingly keen to dress their natural beauties with the products of modern industry. One of the challenges might be to provide these naturally tanned, and with ivory complexions in the low income bracket, get access to products that would magnify their natural looks so that they would enjoy and look for global success in the film, fashion, and beauty products industries. Maybe the Chinese model of low-cost, low-quality beauty products might provide young African beauties the opportunities to shine or catch up with their luckier counterparts in the increasingly competitive world of beautiful African women
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 10 NOVEMBER 2024
