Morsiani, Benedetta. “From Local Production to Global Relations: The Congo Fashion Week London”. Fashion Theory ahead-of-print, n^o ahead-of-print (s. d.): 1‑19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1845532.

This article examines the Congo Fashion Week London (CFWL), a fashion catwalk produced and consumed by Congolese and other Black Africans in London. The paper addresses the various ways through which CFWL organizers, designers and performers act within the contemporary fashion industry. The process is defined as “double-bind”. It involves a multifaceted, often contradictory, positionality between ways of dealing with the “Western gaze", the reproduction of cultural “authenticity” and the contestation of the limiting discourses of Western exoticism. The article reveals how CFWL social actors are influenced by Western and non-Western power relations through which the global fashion industry operates, while their body performances simultaneously emphasize an “original” African narrative and subvert stereotypical boundaries dictated by the West. In addition, the entanglement between the cultural/aesthetic sphere of the CFWL spectacle and its fundraising goal is explored. The paper, therefore, argues that the medium of fashion and its system are embedded in the social world of Black Africans and have effective political weight.

[Source: Article abstract].