Tailoring Identities

Craft, Technology, and Style in Benin, West Africa

Elizabeth Ann Fretwell (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2026
Indiana University Press (Verlag)
978-0-253-07535-2 (ISBN)

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From the wrapped and draped fabrics of precolonial Fon dress to the widespread custom clothing industry of the late twentieth century, Benin's tailors have built both rich traditions of artisanal skill and a storied history of innovation. Their work and expertise clothe everyday life, and in doing so contribute to shifting notions of status, identity, and power in the cities and towns of southern Benin.

Tailoring Identities reveals the rich history behind the gendered and occupational identities of Benin's craftspeople and how their mastery over the material world positioned them as experts in style and sartorial meaning. Drawing on archival records from Benin, the United States, France, and Senegal and connecting them with oral histories, local material archives, and insights from her own apprenticeship with a Beninois master seamstress, Elizabeth Ann Fretwell demonstrates how West African tailors became important technological and cultural agents. By combining and repurposing tools, techniques, and material inputs from African and non-African sources and refining their craft through long-standing regional practices of innovation and collaboration, tailors consistently created groundbreaking fashions while giving form to political and social change.

Shifting conversations about African fashion from its aesthetics, authenticity, and consumption toward the making of garments and the development of craft knowledge, Tailoring Identities opens new artisanal pathways into the interdisciplinary study of fashion and clothing, technology, and urban social history.

Elizabeth Ann Fretwell is Assistant Professor of African History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She received her PhD from University of Chicago and has previously published in Radical History Review, History and Technology, and the Journal of Urban History.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Tailoring Identities
1. Wrapped and Draped: Making Clothing in the Dahomey Kingdom
2. Fitting Changes: The Sartorial Economy and the Tailored Silhouette
3. Tailoring Men: Mobility, Modernity, and Men's Fashions in the Era of Independence
4. The Material Culture of Expertise: Artisanal Ways of Knowing, Apprenticeship, and the Professionalization of Craft
5. Feminizing the Craft: The Urban Workshop, Woman's Space, and Respectable Dress
Conclusion: Tailoring in the Twenty-First Century
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	3.3.2026
Zusatzinfo	37 b&w illus., 4 maps
Verlagsort	Bloomington, IN
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Design / Innenarchitektur / Mode
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-253-07535-1 / 0253075351
ISBN-13	978-0-253-07535-2 / 9780253075352
Zustand	Neuware