Yonki Shonibare - The British Library

How Dutch Wax Fabrics Became a Mainstay of African Fashion

The Philadelphia Museum of Art examines the past and present of Vlisco fabrics, a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world.

Installation view, Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (photo by Tim Tiebout, courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

PHILADELPHIA — Riotously colorful, densely patterned, and unassailably fabulous, Vlisco fabrics have, for decades, been tailored into shift dresses, power suits, and formal gowns for Central and West Africa’s cosmopolitan elite. Their patterns and palettes evince an instantly recognizable aesthetic. And there are scores of Vlisco imitators: Chinese knockoffs are sold on city streets all over the world. But are any of these fabrics in fact African? The exhibition Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage, on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) as part of a suite of shows and programs called “Creative Africa,” poses this question in an indirect but intriguing way, by explaining the company’s origins in the Dutch colonial empire and demonstrating its products’ lasting popularity, in African fashion and beyond. Art enthusiasts, for instance, might recognize Vlisco fabrics from the work of Yinka Shonibare MBE, who has used the them to fashion Victorian-style gowns and waistcoats for the generally headless human figures in his haunting installations. In Shonibare’s work, the fabrics do conceptual double duty: they act as a symbol of “African culture,” for those who perceive their patterns to be indigenous, and as a symbol of our hyperconnected, postcolonial material world, for those who understand the complexities of their origins.

Textile pattern by Constance Girard for Vlisco on view in Vlisco: African Fashion on a Global Stage (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The story of Vlisco begins not in Dakar, Lagos, or Accra, but in the small Dutch city of Helmond, where, in 1846, industrialist Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen purchased a textile factory with the goal of selling upholstery fabric, bedspreads, and handkerchiefs abroad. Van Vlissingen began creating imitation batik fabric based on designs from Indonesia — then known as the Dutch East Indies — with the goal of capitalizing on new roller printing technology that could effect the look of batik without all the labor-intensive work required to make the real thing. Batik originated in China and India in the 8th century, and it was refined in 13th-century Indonesia with the development of a new tool for applying hot wax to fabric known as canting, likely an anglicized form of the word tjanting. When Dutch imitators such as van Vlissingen entered the business, Indonesians noticed small flaws in their fabrics — namely a “crackle” effect, the result of small veins of pigment leaking through the wax resist — and the Dutch East Indies even went so far as to ban their sale in the 19th century. But other areas of the Dutch empire provided a ready, if unexpected, marketplace. Vlisco fabrics became a popular item in a different part of the Dutch colonial ecosystem, starting in Ghana, which was then called the Gold Coast.
The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

The Vlisco factory in the 1950s–60s (image courtesy Vlisco)

Between 1855 and 1872, approximately 3,000 Ghanian soldiers served in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army. They returned home, as servicemen often do, with a taste for items they encountered abroad. As the story goes, the soldiers had learned to appreciate the look of genuine batik but didn’t mind the crackle of the van Vlissingen version, so they purchased bolts of it for their female relatives back in Ghana. By the turn of the century, despite the ceding of the colony to the UK, the sale of Dutch-made faux batik in the Gold Coast was robust. By the 1930s, it was being adapted to suit Ghanian tastes, not by accident, but by design. According to Dilys Blum, the PMA’s senior curator of costume and textiles who organized the exhibition, the trend was so popular that several companies based in England, France, and Switzerland began producing faux batik fabrics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Van Vlissingen responded by consolidating its grip on the marketplace and buying up several smaller concerns. Thus, a fabric produced in Europe with Asia in mind never quite hit the mark in its intended marketplace, but found an enthusiastic audience at the opposite end of the empire.

Scratch the Surface

Britain's involvement in the slave trade started when Elizabethan adventurer John Hawkins made a voyage to the coast of Sierra Leone, West Africa in 1562 with 100 men and three ships. While there, he kidnapped 300 people, sailed to the Caribbean and sold them to Spanish settlers.
Over the subsequent centuries, many people made their fortunes in the slave trade and related businesses such as banking, manufacturing and shipbuilding. These merchants commissioned paintings and collected art to show off their wealth and impress the traditional elite in the 18th century.
This exhibition examined the role that the slave trade played in the lives of two people featured in portraits in our collection: Zoffany's portrait of 'Mrs Oswald' and Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'Colonel Tarleton'.
Colonel Tarleton, as MP for Liverpool in the 1790s, argued very strongly in Parliament against the abolition of the trade. Mrs Oswald, along with her husband Richard Oswald, owed part of their wealth to a number of plantations in the Americas. The painting of Mrs Oswald was bought by the Gallery in 1938, while the Tarleton portrait was bequeathed to the Gallery by one of his descendants in the early 1950s.
As part of the exhibition, 2004 Turner Prize nominee, Yinka Shonibare MBE, was invited to create a new installation in response to these two portraits. This stunning new work went on display in the Barry Rooms.
'Scratch the Surface' is part of a range of activities and events that the National Gallery took part in commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Act to abolish the British trade in African people. Although the Act did not end slavery itself, it was the first attempt by the British to legally bring the trade to a close.

Yinka Shonibare: "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle"

Yinka Shonibare MBE discusses the theatricality and sense of wonder inherent in his public sculpture "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle," installed on the 4th Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Situated across from "Nelson's Column," a monument erected to honor Admiral Lord Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 during the Napoleonic Wars, the brightly-colored sails of Shonibare's boat reference the complex heritage of British colonialism and its multicultural present.

Known for using batik in costumed dioramas that explore race and colonialism, Yinka Shonibare MBE also employs painting, sculpture, photography, and film in work that disrupts and challenges our notions of cultural identity. Taking on the honorific MBE as part of his name in everyday use, Shonibare plays with the ambiguities and contradictions of his attitude toward the Establishment and its legacies of colonialism and class. In multimedia projects that reveal his passion for art history, literature, and philosophy, Shonibare provides a critical tour of Western civilization and its achievements and failures.

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare and the Search for Africa

Yinka Shonibare and the Search for Africa by Ellen Brooks

When British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare was told by his teachers he needed to incorporate “Africa” into his art, to relate more to his “African” heritage, he went shopping. In the Brixton markets in his home of London he found a miraculous textile called Dutch wax. Piled among second-hand clothes, and smelling of the neighborhood’s mostly African and Caribbean cuisine, Shonibare decided these textiles were exactly what had been missing from his identity. Dutch wax textiles were developed in the nineteenth century in the Netherlands, in an attempt to challenge the production of batik cloth in Indonesia. The fabrics were actually rejected by the very Indonesian market for which they were intended, leaving the Dutch and British manufacturers to try to sell the textiles in a second colonial outpost, West Africa. The contradictory nature of the textiles has become more and more integral to Shonibare’s art as his career has progressed.[i]

pattern ID

Certain patterns seem unmistakable: the geometric diamonds of a Navajo blanket, the neatly arranged vines of damask wallpaper, or the interlocking initials of the Louis Vuitton logo. But what happens when you transform the classically sober brown and tan Louis Vuitton pattern into an explosion of bright colors intermingled with Japanese animation forms? Or pair oversized hip-hop clothing with damask wallpaper patterns? Combine fussy Victorian style clothing with vibrant, African prints? The meanings and origins of these patterns are transformed into something new.

Over the last two decades, artists have increasingly turned to pattern and dress as a language with which to communicate who they are and where they come from. The experiences of culture clash, immigration and multi-ethnicity in our globalized world have driven artists to use this visual language to chart their personal and communal histories. Through pattern and dress, artists compress time and cross geographic boundaries to illustrate the various influences that inform their cultural identities. The artists freely mix motifs from popular culture, history and art history to transform the meanings of patterns. Pattern ID features 15 artists of diverse origins who have seized on pattern and dress as powerful visual connectors between themselves, their histories and their audiences.

“The artists use pattern and dress to take up the 21st century challenge of locating one’s place in society against the backdrop of globalization,” said Ellen Rudolph, the museum’s curator of exhibitions. “Many of the artists in the exhibition have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, sexual, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists in Pattern ID reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative.”

The approximately 40 works in Pattern ID include those of: Mark Bradford, (b. 1961, Los Angeles, CA); iona rozeal brown (b. 1966, Washington DC); Nick Cave (b. 1959, Jefferson City, MO); Willie Cole (b. 1955, Somerville, NJ); Lalla Essaydi (b. 1955, Morocco); Samuel Fosso (b. 1962, Cameroon); James Gobel (b. 1972, Las Vegas, NV); Brian Jungen (b. 1970, Fort St. John, British Columbia); Bharti Kher (b. 1969, London); Takashi Murakami (b. 1962, Tokyo); Grace Ndiritu (b. 1976, Birmingham, England); Yinka Shonibare MBE (b. 1962, London); Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971, Camden, NJ); Aya Uekawa (b. 1979, Tokyo); Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles, CA)

Entangled Global Patterns of Cultural Identity

Samuel Fosso, Le Chef: celui qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons

 La femme américaine libérée des années 70

Entangled Global Patterns of Cultural Identity
by Patty Chang


Textile patterns and dress provide a rich visual vocabulary of encoded information and aesthetic expression. They have the ability to exploit or subvert the commercial allure of the “exotic”, and how it is called upon to reference cultural or national identities or even recast the vernacular. The exhibition Pattern ID, which is currently on view at the Akron Art Museum, queries just how straight forward patterns and dress inform our understanding of cultural identities. The multimedia exhibition entitled, Pattern ID, features the works of Mark Bradford, iona rozeal brown, Nick Cave, Willie Cole, Lalla Essaydi, Samuel Fosso, James Gobel, Brian Jungen, Bharti Kher, Takashi Murakami, Grace Ndiritu, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Mickalene Thomas, Aya Uekawa, and Kehinde Wiley. Many of these contemporary artists have migrated from one culture to another, be it national, ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, political or religious. Rather than trade one identity for another, the artists reveal ways in which identity can be cumulative, employing a patchwork of textile patterns and dress as meaningful vehicles to locate one’s place in society against a backdrop of globalization. Taking a range of approaches from humor to irony and formal beauty, these artists borrow from popular culture, world history, and art history to transform and redefine the cultural meanings of patterns.

Yinka Shonibare - How to Blow up Two Heads at Once

How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies & Gentlemen), 2006

Yinka Shonibare - MBE

Yinka Shonibare - Vacancies

Vacation, 2000
Wax-printed cotton textile, fiberglass
On first inspection, Yinka Shonibare's »Vacation« seems an innocuous play on space exploration and its implications for science and human progress. However, Shonibare's astronauts are dressed in space suits of so-called African wax-printed cotton textile, certainly not the attire normally associated with space travel. The astronauts' attire evokes the notion of 'going native', while speaking to the possibilities of a dominant 'Other'. Shonibare's suggestion that one can embody the paradox of alien/Other and colonialist/explorer demonstrates the complexity of power dynamics between groups.

Yinka Sonibare - The Swing

Yinka Sonibare - Gallantry and Criminal, 2002

Shonibare nimmt Bezug auf eine "Grand Tour", eine Landpartie von Adligen im 18. Jahrhundert. Die Kostüme sind aus bedruckten afrikanischen Stoffen geschneidert.

Yinka Shonibare, a British Nigerian artist working in the twenty first century, represents more than just a meeting of two identities; his art more than just Africa meeting the West. Best known for his sculptural installations, Shonibare dresses life-size headless mannequins in elaborate Victorian fashions. The cloth he chooses for these clothes, however, has a trajectory of its own. Dutch wax is a complicated material, with roots in both Europe and Africa and meaning that changes upon its context. Using the Dutch wax to upset the inherent harmony of the art historical importance his works recall, Shonibare plays with how we interpret one another. In the piece 100 Years from 2000 he takes his game to a new level. Exploiting the modernist form of the grid with Dutch wax, Shonibare uses the size and conflicting materials of paint and textile to represent more than just a joke. 100 Years exposes a deeper entanglement: a more painful relationship between Africa and the West that has been masked with both humor and ignorance for over a century.