Traditional African garments are generally tailored locally according to the verbal style description of the client who buys the textile and pays for the tailor’s work. Taking a piece from history,
The summer is gone and the trees are slowly dropping the leaves that have lost their green colour and turning yellow and brown. The temperature is falling, the days are getting shorter and the sky is seldom blue. The autumn is moving in. The time has come to change the content of the wardrobe. It is time to replace light summer clothing with warmer sweatshirts, sweaters and jackets. This is not a big issue; simply check out the boutiques and retailer shops near you to see what fashion designers have created for the autumn/winter 2007/8.
Maxi dresses, miniskirts, bell bottoms, jeans in diverse variations and a lot more styled garments have been in and out of the fashion scene. Fashion is more or less part of lifestyle. Even those that are not necessarily fashion-conscious still decide what to wear for a rendezvous. Since centuries, fashion has always played a role in the society. Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote in his play Hamlet “… For the apparel oft proclaims the man”. In the following report, the fashion collection for winter 2006/2007 by some popular fashion labels are presented.
Fashion is big business. A small city in Germany ’s region of North Rhine-Westphalia is a major textile manufacturing location, where about 90% of silk ties on sale in Germany are produced. This is why the city is known as the city of velvet and silk. The real name is Krefeld. Krefeld organizes a yearly event termed the biggest street fashion show of the world (Größte Strassenmodenschau der Welt), which attracts thousands of visitors. AFRITOPIC attended the event.
Textile design and the production of textiles today are generally related to high technological processing. Textiles used for all sorts of applications including fashion design are produced en mass by the textile industry. Most of the indigenous local methods of creating textile design and producing textiles are no more in use, forgotten or only practiced by a very few group of people.