Gallery of Poems collection, 2010

Jos Arts

Vlisco

4

Whether poor or rich, people still need to communicate. Naguib Swiris

Many people believe that the Afr ican is a person of very

simple tastes who is ready to acc ept all sort of second

quality goods and clearing lines, and crude designs and

garish colours, which the more fas hionable nations reject.

This is far from the truth. Ray Butler

Having her own Dutch Wax is eve ry woman’s dream. Ken Bugul

Whether poor or rich, people still need to communicate. Naguib Swiris

Many people believe that the Afr ican is a person of very

simple tastes who is ready to acc ept all sort of second

quality goods and clearing lines, and crude designs and

garish colours, which the more fas hionable nations reject.

This is far from the truth. Ray Butler

Having her own Dutch Wax is eve ry woman’s dream. Ken Bugul

61 Dazzling Graphics collection, 2011

2 Si tu sors, je sors, Noud Jeurgens, 1978

Preface

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch fabric manufacturer

Vlisco put its factory-made batik on the African market for the first

time. By 1960, deliveries of Real Dutch Wax had risen to 34 mil-

lion yards. In West and Central Africa, the Vlisco brand (the name is

always carefully woven into the selvedge) has now come to repre-

sent the height of luxury. At important functions and ceremonies, the

preferred mode of dress is always Dutch Wax. Vlisco has become a

major African fashion icon, and Africans regard Dutch Wax as part of

their own cultural heritage. How did textiles that were designed in

Helmond, the Netherlands, and manufactured using a technique

born in Indonesia, grow into a symbol of African identity? This

book is a detailed discussion of that very question.

A typical aspect of African culture is that people are accustomed

to recycling everything and to adapting products to suit their own

taste. As we know, second-hand clothing and discarded tins are often

reused there in innovative ways. The application of Dutch Wax,

argues Jos Arts, must be seen in the same light: as a cultural im-

provisation in which clothing is given new value and meaning geared

to the African situation.

To a great extent the basis of Vlisco’s success lies in the fact that the

company has developed a semi-manufactured product. The fabric

may be designed and manufactured in Helmond, but the patterns do

not acquire meaning until they get to Africa, in dialogue with market

women and merchants. The wearer then transforms the fabric into

a garment (alone or in consultation with a dressmaker) in which the

1010pattern is critical to the final silhouette. This process has continued

unchanged for almost a century.

In recent years, Vlisco has tried to respond to the wishes of a new

generation of African women − modern, sophisticated women who

are still intent on showing their African identity on certain occa-

sions. Vlisco develops fashion textiles for them that change with the

season, and in its flagship stores the company demonstrates the

various models that can be made with these fabrics. Vlisco Fashion

Academies train dressmakers to make these outfits. This is a fasci-

nating new direction for Vlisco, the impact of which will be visible in

the years to come.

In 2009, third-year students in the fashion department of the ArtEZ

Institute of the Arts designed a whole fashion collection based on

fabrics by Vlisco. Fashion designers Junya Watanabe and Bernhard

Willhelm have also recently used the striking and widely recognised

Dutch wax designs in their collections. Vlisco made a name for itself

in the world of art when Yinka Shonibare featured the wax textiles

in his installations exposing the colonial history of the West. As a

result, Vlisco has become increasingly well-known and popular in

the Western world in recent decades. Vlisco has also become a house-

hold word in contemporary fashion research, as the literature list

in the back of this book testifies. The Dutch Wax phenomenon is

not something that can easily be pigeonholed under the classical

concepts of colonial rule and dominance of Western fashion. What

emerges from the Vlisco story is a unique interplay of cultures that

radically alters our vision of what constitutes both a ‘national’

identity and habits of fashion and dress.

Vlisco is seventh in a series of publications dealing with those Dutch

fashion designers and companies that have been significant in the

development of fashion, both in the Netherlands and around the

world. The aim of ArtEZ Modelectoraat in issuing the series is to

create a more comprehensive picture of Dutch fashion and design

history. This text is based on extensive archival research and on

interviews with key players and designers. The series also comprises

monographs on Alexander van Slobbe, Oilily, Fong-Leng, Jan Jansen,

Spijkers en Spijkers and Marlies Dekkers. The series is published in

collaboration with ArtEZ Press.

José Teunissen

Professor of Fashion Design, ArtEZ Institute of the Arts

Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts, London

3 ABC – Alphabet ABC, Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1920

An African legend in stormy weather

Panic in Helmond

It all started with an alarming phone call. Followed by an-

other. And another. And yet another. And all those phone

calls carried the same message. In Benin, the November-

December period is normally high season for the sale of

clothing and fabrics. The holidays are around the corner

so naturally everyone wants a new outfit, and there are

Christmas presents to be bought. And what could be pret-

tier than a Real Dutch Wax − a wax print cloth from the

Dutch manufacturer Vlisco? The Dutch Wax, writes the

Senegalese Ken Bugul in the French newspaper Libération,

is a sign and symbol of fashion,1 of elegance. A woman’s

1 Here Ken Bugul effortlessly links the notion of ‘fashion’ with that of ‘Africa’. This is less straightforward than it seems. Sandra Niessen (2003) points out that fashion is still generally regarded by sociologists, anthropologists, art historians and cultural scientists as a specifically Western phenomenon that differs radically from the non-Western clothing system. Fashion, they say, stands for continuous and rapid change, for progress. The non-Western clothing system is regarded as unchanging, traditional and static. Jennifer Craik puts it this way: ‘The term fashion is rarely used in reference to non-Western cultures. The two are defined in opposition to each other: Western dress is fashion because it changes regularly, is superficial and mundane, and projects individual identity; non-Western dress is costume because it is unchanging, encodes deep meanings, and projects group identity and membership’ (Quoted in Rovine 2004, p. 191). Niessen calls for a revision of the definition of fashion that also includes non-Western clothing systems, a view that seems to be gaining increasingly broader adherence. For example, Karen Tranberg Hansen (2004, p. 370) comes to the conclusion that fashion is no longer the exclusive domain of the West, and in the special African Fashion / African Style issue of the magazine Fashion Theory an attempt was made to demonstrate that fashion is not endemic to the Western world alone (Rovine 2009, p. 137). Also see Eicher and Sumberg (1995), Brand and Teunissen (2006) and Gott and Loughran (2010).

14wardrobe, she says, is not complete without a few gar-

ments made from Dutch Wax, which makes it a frequent

topic of discussion among many women in West and

Central Africa, including Bugul herself − and she’s the first

to admit it (Bugul 2010). Tom Mbakwe even dares to argue

that for many African women, Dutch Wax is as important

as the Bible is for Christians (Mbakwe 2002), while Anne

Grosfilley sees Dutch Wax as a luxury product that carries

the same status as French perfume (Grosfilley 2004, p. 32).

A Congolese man with marriage in mind must bring gifts

for the family of his bride-to-be when he comes calling,

preferably a couple of wax prints. If his gifts are not Vlisco

products − or more precisely, not Superwax − he is not

taken seriously.2

But in December 2004 in the open-air markets of Cotonou

and Porto-Novo in Benin, Dutch Wax suddenly seemed to

have lost its popularity. At least that was the gist of the

phone calls coming in to Eric Loko, Vlisco’s country man-

ager in Benin, where a large portion of the African Vlisco

fabrics were shipped for further distribution. The whole-

salers, middlemen, market vendors, stylists and boutique

owners − all of them complained that sales had plummeted

in comparison with the year before, something that Loko

2 Interview with Odia Kabakele, Kinshasa, 16 March 2011. The importance that is attached to fabrics and clothing in Africa has to do with the fact that fabrics were used as a means of exchange before the introduction of coins. In many areas, expensive fabrics have traditionally been a sign of wealth, status and prestige, and the owning and wearing of quality fabrics are uniquely feminine ways of expres-sing affluence (Perani and Wolf 1999, p. 34; Rabine 2002, p. 30; Gott 2010, p. 19).

4 Snailskin – Peau de léopards – Nkoi Nkoi, Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1922

5 Big Step – Staircase – L’escalier – Owu atwere (Death’s ladder which everyone will climb – Ghana), Haarlemsche Katoenmaatschappij, 1927