Public Lecture: Indigenous Traditional Fashion?

Indigenous Traditional Fashion? Documenting Endangered Leather Technologies of the Kalahari’ by Dr Chris Wingfield

Two hundred years ago, nearly all clothing worn across the Kalahari was made from animals, using locally available materials and indigenous technologies. As southern Africa has been steadily integrated into the fashion regimes of the wider Atlantic world, the economic value of these older practices has steadily declined. This talk will consider this wider history before describing a project that set out to document existing skills of leather production across four locations in Botswana as a way to understand the technologies, skills and forms of knowledge underpinning historic forms of fashion and dress that are preserved in museum collections around the world.

Chris Wingfield is an Associate Professor in the Arts of Africa at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia in the UK. Born in Johannesburg, he was educated in the UK and has worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology in Cambridge. Chris is also an Associate Researcher at UCT’s Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, where he held an NRF-DST Fellowship in 2017.

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