Tailoring Identities: Craft, Technology, and Style in Benin, West Africa

From the wrapped and draped fabrics of precolonial Fon clothing 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 the development of status, identity, and power in their growing cities and throughout their newly independent country.

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 state 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.