Black Yarns: A Decolonial Research into the History of Black Women's Fashion & Jewellery. Design Practices in France (1939-1966).

This research aims to reveal a decolonial critique of fashion museology by sharing genealogies of black women designers between 1939 and 1966. In it I reflect on the absence of black women designers in contemporary fashion history in France and Europe coming from my French/Ivorian designer-researcher background. I want to restore missing narratives by re-editing archival garments and jewellery, potentially reattributing designs to their owners by publishing a research book of portraits and photographs including restored pieces. Creating archives, crafting garments issued from collective fashion memory will help fill the blanks using speculation and fictions based on black women who played a role in fashion between France and Senegal. The artistic context is rewriting history through designing following artist Fabiola Jean-Louis. The theoretical context is decoloniality and Senegalese/French fashion histories. The period (1939-1966) delimits Rabi Diop's photographs arriving in Paris and the "Festival des Arts nègres" initiated by Léopold Sédar Senghor in Dakar. My methodology is based on critical fabulation, using imagination to connect with the past. The goal is to contribute to the decolonization of contemporary fashion history by acknowledging and re-creating a denied black fashion genealogy with contemporary fashion in France to propose new creative routes against eurocentric institutional universalism.

Keywords:FASHION DESIGN, MUSEOLOGY

Disciplines:Postcolonial studies, Fashion design, Museology

Project type:Collaboration project