"Hot and Haute: Alphadi's Fashion for Peace," African Arts, v. 47, no. 2 (2014), p. 40-55.

40 | african arts SUMMER 2014 VOL. 47, NO. 2

Hot and HauteAlphadi’s Fashion for Peace

Amanda Gilvin

On January 18, 2013, Nigerien fashion designer Sidhamed “Alphadi” Seidnaly hosted the grand opening of his fi rst boutique in the United States, the Alphadi Gallery in Brook-lyn. Attendees crammed into the shop to celebrate and get a few peeks at Alphadi’s

designs. Th ere were plans to showcase work by many design-ers from Africa and its diaspora, but for the opening, it was just Alphadi’s signature bustiers perched over racks fi lled with his designs that draw heavily on dress traditions of West and North Africa. Models circulated wearing his silky interpretations of the djellaba, a kind of cloak from Morocco, as well as heavily embroidered ensembles such as a bustier framed by a matching silk headscarf and skirt (Fig. 1). Alphadi himself wore an ensem-ble of his own design, including a take on the hula, a small cap popular throughout West Africa (Fig. 2).

A television looped through runway shows of Alphadi’s work. A romantic pastoral scene by Nigerien Tuareg painter Rhissa Ixa had a central position on one wall. Ixa’s fantasy of historic noble Tuaregs living carefully ordered, autonomous lives in a stateless desert complements the glamorous Africa evoked in Alphadi’s designs—and the reputation of this Tuareg fashion designer known by the nicknames “Th e Prince of the Desert” and the “Magician of the Desert.” Th e name “Tuareg” refers to a diverse ethnic group related to other Berber, or Amazigh, groups in West and North Africa. Historically divided into distinct politi-cal federations, large numbers of Tuareg can be found in Mali, Niger, Algeria, and Libya. Recent art historical analyses have focused on the silver jewelry and leatherwork made by the ina-dan, an endogamous caste within the hierarchical Tuareg social structure (Loughran 2003; Seligman and Loughran 2006a; Selig-man 2006a). Tuareg identities continue to shift in amorphous

ways, as some Tuareg nobles continue to demand a Tuareg state, many Tuareg artisans actively commodify their culture, and some descendants of those once enslaved by Tuareg nobles now proudly claim the Tuareg ethnicity (Bernus 2006; Ewan-gaye 2006; Livermore 2013).1 Th ere is no singular Tuareg view of the present—or past—but Ixa’s idealized desert scene speaks to shared cultures and histories in the Sahara and the Sahel.

Th at night in New York, attendees knew all too well what was actually happening in the Malian and Nigerien deserts at the same time we were toasting champagne in a shop just around the corner from the Brooklyn Museum. Th e French military had launched Opération Serval a week before to aid the Malian mili-tary in fi ghting groups that had taken control of northern Mali: which included the Mouvement National pour la Libération de l’Azawad, which sought to establish a Tuareg state; Ansar Dine, a largely Tuareg Islamist group seeking to impose sharia law; and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, an Islamist group with roots in Alge-ria and networks across the world. Refugees from Mali, includ-ing many Tuaregs, had been fl eeing to Niger for months, where they encountered a country already challenged to feed its own population. Th e ancient cities of Timbuktu and Gao had been occupied by AQIM or related groups since April 2012. Th ere were concerns about war crimes committed by the Malian army against Tuaregs and Arabs. Th e hostage crisis at the Algerian/Statoil/BP-owned natural gas facility at In Aménas, Algeria, was ongoing, as was the Battle of Diabaly. Th e Malian army had just reclaimed the strategic city of Konna without resistance.2

In brief remarks, Alphadi told the models, designers, journal-ists, Nigeriens, Malians, family members, and at least one art his-torian that “I was born in Timbuktu. Th is is fashion for peace.” Like the Festival Internationale de la Mode Africaine, or FIMA, the Gallery is part of Alphadi’s larger commercial project for

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VOL. 47, NO. 2 SUMMER 2014 african arts | 41

which fashion is a vehicle to promote African autonomy, more equitable standards of living, and the beautifi cation of diverse human bodies. Th is project diff ers from many recent examples of social entrepreneurship through its attention to changing how people around the world see and experience African aesthet-ics (Peredo and McLean 2006; Noruzi, Westover, and Rahimi 2010). Born on the eve of independence in what would become the nation of Mali, into a culture that prized its nomadic life, Alphadi is a citizen of Niger, which would be transformed by a ballooning uranium industry during his young adulthood. His career as a designer builds on decades of engagement with haute couture and world fashion in Niger.3 His recent work simultane-ously confronts neocolonial stereotypes of Africa and demands a reconceptualization of the current Saharan crisis. With aesthetic allusions that are pan-African in scope, Alphadi’s reinterpre-tations of Tuareg visual culture have taken on new saliency in response to increasingly common representations of the Tuareg

ethnicity in popular journalism around the world. By describ-ing his work as “fashion for peace,” he proposes that commercial enterprises grounded in aesthetic creation can shift power and redistribute capital in more equitable ways.

HOT POLITICS AND HOT FASHION IN NIGER

Born in 1957 in Timbuktu, Alphadi trained in tourism, and in his fi rst career, in the 1970s and 1980s, he worked for Niger’s Ministry of Tourism. Th ere, it was necessary to confront how Nigeriens and the rest of the world saw Niger. He explained that “I spent ten years as an offi cial in the Ministry of Tour-ism working to promote cultural and artistic tourism. I worked to promote Niger as more than camels and the desert.”4 Even as the Ministry appealed to deep-seated European colonial fantasies of the Sahara Desert to attract international tourists, Alphadi proposed a more complex portrait of Niger, one that included its diverse arts.

1 A model wears one of Alphadi’s signature bust-iers with a coordinating silk headscarf and skirt at the opening of the Alphadi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, January 18, 2013. Photo: Courtesy of Anna Toure Public Rela-tions

2 Wearing an embroidered hat of his design, which is based on the hula popular through the Sahel region, Alphadi and an attendee look at a hooded jacket at the opening of the Alphadi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. January 18, 2013. Photo: Courtesy of Anna Toure Public Rela-tions

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In the 1980s, Niger had many challenges and an accompa-nying image problem inside and outside of the country. Niger was viewed as hot in all of the wrong ways. Prone to droughts and famines, its climate, where temperatures hover around 100 degrees Fahrenheit during much of the year, added to the sense of its extremity and remoteness. As the interim military state that had taken power in 1974 began a second decade, most international bodies and foreign governments considered the political situation too hot to touch. Th e French interfered little in government aff airs, so long as they could continue to exploit the uranium mines. Th e uranium itself was radioactively hot.

Alphadi oft en attributes his interest in fashion to a childhood surrounded by his Tuareg mother and sisters, who constantly attended to their impeccable dress (FIMA 2009a; Loughran 2009). Susan Rasmussen writes of being “oft en struck by the importance of dress and accessory ensembles, among both women and men” during her fi rst research on Tuareg culture in Niger (Rasmussen 2006:139). Tuareg men, too, are famous for their attention to sartorial detail. Th e tagulmust is a veil worn by Tuareg men as a marker of reserve and honor, as well as pro-tection against the elements in the Sahel and Sahara (Murphy 1964; Rasmussen 1991; Seligman and Loughran 2006a). Rasmus-sen describes its complex social uses, in which it may simultane-ously preserve modesty and command attention through artful arrangement (Rasmussen 2010, 2013). It has become a global identifying marker of Tuareg ethnicity. Th e Niger of Alphadi’s experience was populated by hot—as in stylish and attractive—

3 American performer Josephine Baker posed with her pet cheetah in the early 1930s. Photo Card No. 101, Photograph by Piaz Studios of Paris, early 1930s. Photo: Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum

4 The popular journal L’Illustration used a painting by Paul-Elie Dubois in one of its special issues on the Exposition Colonial Internationale in Paris in 1931. Dubois’s painting assumed viewers’ familiarity with the “Berber Myth,” which portrayed Tuaregs and other Amazigh people as descended from European ancestors, but who had failed to progress to the supposedly more civilized state of twentieth century Europeans. In the French colonial popular imagina-tion, Tuareg men’s veils represented their exoticism and their formidableness. The veiled Tuareg warriors portray a power the French nation-state claimed to have vanquished. The immense camels and huge shields were assumed to have been defeated by cars, guns, and medicine. Paul-Elie Dubois, Cover of L’Illustration, May 23, 1931. Courtesy of L’Illustration. ©2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

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Africans who cultivated their public personas by combining historic forms of dress with up-to-the-minute world fashion. Alphadi recognized the intricate artisanal work in leather, silver, textiles, and ceramics as luxury items in a largely industrialized global economy.5 Th e uranium that funded his government job was crucial to the lives of even the French who could not fi nd Niger on a map. Th e Niger he lived in was not a remote periph-ery, but a vibrant center of aesthetic creation and a crucial actor in the world economy. Alphadi’s Niger was both hot and haute.

Although publicity for his events continues to emphasize the audacity of hosting a fashion show in Niger, Alphadi’s fi rst visions of Niamey as a fashion center were built on precedents from the optimistic Niamey of the nationalist 1960s. At that time, the ever-growing access to imported cloth in Niger’s urban centers nurtured experiments in fashion. Wealthy women kept abreast of trends in regional centers like Dakar and Abidjan, as well as the fashions in Paris. In April 1964, Maud Africa presented its fi rst collection of haute couture in Niamey (Le Niger 1964). On March 11, 1967, the Musée National du Niger hosted an event they called “Niger-Confection,” about which a journalist remarked that “a clear evo-lution in fashion is in the making” (Le Niger 1967). Th is sense of perpetual change demonstrated some Nigeriens’ conscious adop-tion of the tenets of world fashion, or the ongoing change in styles of dress due to the mass production of textiles and prêt-a-porter clothing enabled by industrialization.

Dress and fashion were central ways that Africans through-out the continent participated in nationalist representation and modernist expression in the post-independence era (Renne 1995; Perani and Wolff 1999; Rabine 2002; Allman 2004a). Nkrumah famously transformed kente into a Pan-Africanist icon by wear-ing it as formal presidential dress (Allman 2004b). Industrially produced textiles gained new social and economic importance in the 1960s and 1970s, as independent African nation-states built factories to produce them (Picton 1995; Gott 2010; Sylvanus 2013). Meanwhile, the adoption of new styles was sometimes a fl ash point for confl ict over social change (Ivaska 2004; Renne 2013). When Alphadi began studying fashion in Paris, he fol-lowed important African precedents in European haute couture. In particular, Malian designer Chris Seydou had lived in Paris in the 1970s, where he studied fashion and launched his label (Rovine 2001). Like Seydou, Alphadi found that in France he faced industry discrimination and in Africa, market disinterest (Rovine 2001:114; Seidnaly 2009). Although the largest and most dramatic, FIMA is just one of the various ways that Alphadi has joined his colleagues to foster an African fashion industry. Fash-ion remains a signifi cant form of aesthetic expression through-out Africa, and the growing numbers of designers, models, and fashion photographers result from earlier generations’ advocacy for the recognition of African creativity (Gott and Loughran 2010; Jennings 2011; Hansen and Madison 2013).

HOT AFRICANISMS

As Nigeriens and other Africans were embracing new fash-ions—and fashion systems—in the 1960s and 1970s, images of Africa were once again stylish in European haute couture and pop-ular fashion in the form of what art historian Victoria Rovine has termed “Africanisms” (Rovine 2009a). Building upon scholarly

observations that Western and non-Western dress practices have been studied in isolation, Rovine has argued that “temporality is central in this division between Western and non-Western dress practices, epitomized by the all too prevalent discussion of non-Western dress in terms of an ‘ethnographic present’ as opposed to the ‘perpetual future’ associated with Western fashion’s continual rush to the next season” (Rovine 2009b). Th e sense of “perpetual future” not only represents Africa as if outside of time or in a per-petual history, but it also elides the history of the Africanisms that manifest over and over again in Western fashion.

The adoption of aesthetics from Africa was in many ways crystallized in the heyday of negrophilia, a rage for black cul-

5 Summoning to mind Chris Seydou’s work with bogolanfi ni in the 1970s, the textile here demon-strates the luxurious potential of African handwoven materials in haute couture marketed around the world. The leopard fur alludes to both the many dress traditions in Africa in which leopard fur rep-resents power and the primitivist history in France represented by Josephine Baker. Alphadi Haute Couture, Fall/Winter 2004/2005. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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tural forms centered in 1920s and 1930s Paris (Cliff ord 1989; Pieterse 1992; Jules-Rosette 1998; Archer Straw 2000). Josephine Baker, the African American actress, dancer, and expatriate, created a successful performance career in Paris by plumb-ing the popular French imagination for primitivist stereotypes that she could perform and transform. As argued by art his-torian Petrine Archer Straw, Baker was particularly skilled in manipulating popular associations of animality with blackness (Jules-Rosette 1998:129; Archer Straw 2000:94, 119). In one pho-tograph, she leans from her seated position to look at her pet cheetah at eye level, and the large cat seems to return her gaze (Fig. 3). Th e design on the loose, draping sleeves of her elegant evening dress echoes the cheetah’s spots, visually connecting them, just as their postures convey commensurability. Cheetah

and leopard print denoted luxury, but also an exotic, sexualized primitivism attached to Baker’s performances, especially because both of the large cats were known to hail from Africa (Archer Straw 2000:78).6 Sociologist Bennetta Jules-Rosette emphasized Baker’s deployment of fashion to repeatedly recreate her image (Jules-Rosette 2007:145). Th e shimmering satin distinguishes Baker from the cat and identifi es her as the fashion icon that she was. Th e photo depicts the tensions in Baker’s strategic tran-sition to de-emphasize the “wild and savage” for the “chic and independent” (Jules-Rosette 2007:144, 150).

Images of the Tuareg have a distinct history in Europe. Tuareg men have been familiar fi gures in French exotic mythologies since the mid-nineteenth century, and their images could be found in ethnographic texts, children’s storybooks, and fash-ion magazines as frequently as in newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. Because it upended European gendered expectations of modesty, the tagulmust especially intrigued anthropologists, colonial offi cials, and doubtlessly those children reading story-books (Seligman 2006b:19–25). It was presented as a defi ning feature of Tuareg culture as early as 1864 in Henri Duveyrier’s popular account of his travels in the Sahara, Les Touareg du Nord (Duveyrier 1864). In 1931, the magazine L’Illustration used a painting of two Tuareg warriors by Orientalist painter Paul-Elie Dubois on the cover of one of its fi rst special issues dedicated to the Exposition Coloniale Internationale (Fig. 4).7 Viewed from below, the fi gures, veiled and draped in indigo robes, peer down from impossibly elongated camels, and they seem so impervious that they would never need the shields that swing nonchalantly at their sides.

Several Tuareg federations successfully resisted French domi-nation for years, and French colonial theorists invented what art historian Cynthia Becker has called “the Berber Myth” in order to situate the Tuareg and other Amazigh ethnicities into their colonial racial taxonomies. Th e myth portrayed the Tuareg as a people descended from European ancestors, but who had failed to progress to the supposedly more civilized status of twentieth century Europeans (Becker 2009). Tuareg men’s veiling prac-tices distanced them from both the French and their neighbors and contributed to their perceived power. Just as popular litera-ture emphasized the tagulmust as a symbol of Tuareg fi ctional power, French colonial authorities worked tirelessly to diminish actual Tuareg power, and scientists and ethnographers sought to document unveiled Tuareg men (Duveyrier 1864; Atgier 1910; Foley 1995). Th e image of a Tuareg man was in many ways the prototypical colonized body in French popular imagination, for precisely because they confounded previous racial taxonomies and fi ercely refused French culture, once defeated, they seemed safely categorized and contained after decades of presenting both physical and economic threats to French colonial inter-ests in Africa. Th ey were available to be visually possessed. In Dubois’s image, the threat of real violence was reduced to a titil-lating fantasy that could be bought and sold; it was a temporary, colonial, and consumerist peace.

In the 1960s, countercultural activists in Europe and the United States, including “hippies,” feminists, Pan-Africanists, Black Power advocates, antiwar protestors, and others appropri-ated non-Western dress elements to challenge racist, sexist, and

6 While he draws inspiration from many African dress traditions, French haute couture, and global popular fashion, Alphadi consistently returns to Tuareg aesthetic forms. In this ensemble, the form of the Agadez cross and other Tuareg crosses are embroidered onto the skirt, and the silver bustier recalls the signifi cance of silver jewelry in Tuareg art and culture. Alphadi Haute Couture, Fall/Winter 2004/2005. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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nationalist power structures by celebrating, oft en in a roman-tic primitivist vein, avowedly superior non-Western cultures (Welters 2008). Haute couture designers also quickly returned to non-Western aesthetics, and the Algerian-born Yves Saint Laurent reintroduced Africa as daring and sexually alluring in a 1967 line of mini-dresses (Jennings 2011:12). Th e designs were not direct appropriations of African patterns, but instead they alluded to various textile, beadwork, and architectural motifs from diff erent regions of Africa. Th ese Africanisms and others would remain salient shorthand markers in the global fashion system that Alphadi entered when he began his career in the 1980s (Rovine 2009a).

ALPHADI: APOLITICAL HAUTE COUTURE

While pursuing graduate studies in tourism at the Univer-sité d’Angers, Alphadi also completed an accelerated diploma at the Atelier Chardon Savard in Paris in 1983. Staff from Chardon Savard visited Niamey regularly in 1984 and 1985 to continue his training and to support his new studio. He completed both a mas-ter’s degree and a doctorate in Tourism at the Université d’Angers during the 1980s. He would balance his fashion career with his duties at the Ministry of Tourism until leaving government work in 1989. Upon launching his own label in 1984, he encountered many business challenges in both Niger and Europe. As he sought out both European and African customers, Alphadi contemplated the history of the appropriation of African aesthetic forms by European designers and artists. In 2009, he told an audience of Nigerien university students in Niamey that

We have been copied by so many European designers. It is up to you to protect African designers, sculptors, artists ... Culture is money. We need to take charge of it … Africa is sold too cheaply … Africans need to understand that their creativity has value (Seidnaly 2009).

In this explanation, Alphadi clearly embraces the phenomenon that anthropologists John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2009) have termed “Ethnicity, Inc.” by inviting the young students to join him in commodifying cultural forms to sell to global mar-kets. He responds the exigencies of the neoliberal capitalist mar-ket and its colonial heritage by seeking to rebrand the Tuareg ethnicity, the Nigerien state, and the African continent through representing himself as a modern Afropolitan and his fashion as globally branded haute couture and world fashion.

To be an Afropolitan is to have a home in Africa, but to be at home in many other places (Hassan 2009; Wosomu 2009; Far-ber 2010). Committed to his home in Niamey, Alphadi spends much of the year there—and he may spend an equal amount of time in any given year in Paris and New York now. For Alphadi, the Afropolitan concept is most important as a geographic and demographic description:

Th e term Afropolitan refers to the modern African continent … Th e word is very important because it demonstrates that Africa is a conti-nent on the move. It does not have much money now, but it is an up and coming continent.8

Th us, if Alphadi is an Afropolitan person, he attributes this to the Afropolitan character of Africa itself. Africanisms serve to anchor his fashion as Afropolitan.

Like many African fashion designers, Alphadi embraces diverse African aesthetic forms as design choices and philo-sophical statements. In a coat from his 2004/2005 Fall/Winter haute couture collection, the bogolanfi ni expresses pan-African aesthetic and technological expertise (Fig. 5; Rovine 2001). First popularized in fashion by Chris Seydou, bogolanfi ni, a hand-woven cloth dyed with clay, has taken on multivalent mean-ings in Mali, where it originated, and far beyond (Rovine 2001, 2007).9 In a homage to Seydou, the coat also shows the hand-made authenticity of African “craft ” to be equal to the handmade authenticity of European haute couture (Rovine 2001:112–17). In this Parisian fashion show, the leopard fur inevitably alludes to Baker’s legacy and adds one more luxurious element to the hand-woven shell of the coat. Th e coat is a reclamation of the aesthetic beauty and symbolism in the uses of leopard fur in dress around the African continent, where it is associated with power. Alphadi has explained that

Th e leopard is a completely beautiful and magnifi cent animal that alludes to the huge continent of Africa. He is the king of the desert, like the lion is king of the forest. Th e leopard has a sense of power. Josephine Baker wore leopard fur as an African symbol of power in her dances in Paris, and all of the important European brands have used it … I use leopard print because it characterizes power, dyna-mism, and an Africa that progresses.10

In many cultures in both West and Central Africa, only men with great political and social authority wore leopard skin and other luxury furs, and it remains signifi cant symbolic dress in

7 In 2000, FIMA introduced a new logo, in which the “M” became a tagulmust, or the veil traditionally worn by elite Tuareg men. The symbolism of the tagulmust, which men used to maintain modesty and reserve, shifts to repre-sent the Tuareg ethnicity, the Nigerien nation, and African dress more generally. Formerly a threatening symbol to French colonial offi cials seeking to unveil Tuareg men, the tagulmust in the FIMA logo is a friendly cartoon, empty of a person to wear it.

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some cultures (Ruel 1969; Roberts 1994; Blier 1995; Perani and Wolff 1999; and MacGaff ey 2000).11

Tuareg forms have been especially visible in Alphadi’s work, and the shape of Cross of Agadez, which the Nigerien nation-state also claims as a nationalist symbol, oft en appears as an appliqué or in embroidery on dresses (Fig. 6). Th omas Selig-man and Kristyne Loughran call it “one of the few recogniz-able designs that seem to instantly say ‘Africa’” (Seligman and Loughran 2006b:251). Capable of being used as shorthand for the Tuareg ethnicity, the Nigerien nation, and the African con-tinent, the Cross of Agadez marks Alphadi’s fashion as “African” and in turn, his fashion valorizes the ethnicity, nation, and conti-nent that it represents. In this example from his 2004/2005 Fall/Winter haute couture collection, the metallic bustier also alludes to the historic Tuareg jewelry by inadan artists.

In his career as a designer, Alphadi has focused on his haute couture lines, but he has introduced several other branches to

his brand. In 2001, he introduced his fi rst perfume, L’Aïr. In 2005 came his line of sportswear, along with two more perfumes, Alphadi For Men and Alphadi For Women. His line of leather goods arrived in 2006. Diversifying his products remains a key business strategy, especially through expanding his brand’s off er-ings in prêt-à-porter garments and accessories. His haute cou-ture successes undergird his brand’s value, while the perfume, accessories, and prêt-à-porter clothing sell on a larger scale and with a greater profi t margin. He envisions a more industrialized Africa, a site of production instead of solely a source for natural resource exploitation (Seidnaly 2009). He nonetheless draws on some of those natural resources to describe his work.

Alphadi vaunts his inspirations from African aesthetic sys-tems and landscapes, especially those of Niger. His offi cial press description explains that:

In his designs, he brings the soul of Africa to life. Sometimes you fi nd the spirit of the dunes in luminous ochre colors, while at another moment, you sense the river in the fl uidity of blue veils … His origi-nality stems from a blend of age-old Songhay, Djerma, Wodaabe, Hausa, and Tuareg savoir-faire … And the bold lines and shapes of Western design (FIMA 2009a).

In this characterization of his work, Alphadi reclaims ownership over the confl ated African lands and African bodies of colonial imaginaries. He also makes a nationalist assertion of rights over the aesthetic forms of all the ethnic groups of Niger, as well as an anticolonialist and modernist gesture of expertise over “the bold lines and shape of Western design.” While the description gives some emphasis to his Tuareg background in references to desert dunes and the tagulmust, it also indicates a much broader scope for his inspirations. Th is amalgamation is central to his idea of design modernization, which relates to his methods of produc-tion and desire to industrialize fashion production in Niger. For him, to modernize in design means to “try to give a chance to everyone to wear a product that pleases them: Africans, the French, Americans, even the Chinese. It is a question of indus-trialization, but also a question of color, of trends. To modernize is to have savoir-faire, to simplify, to minimize.”12 For him, the capacity to meet the shared but mercurial tastes of a globalized market indicates modernity, as does the capacity to produce on a large scale in order to sell to diverse and far-fl ung customers.

Alphadi frequently explains that he is “one hundred percent apolitical,” despite the broadly political implications of his goals for African economic development and intellectual property rights rooted in the fashion industry. His refutation of a political identity is perhaps the savviest political element of his carefully craft ed persona. First of all, it adds to his image as an individu-alist free-spirited artist in the Western modernist tradition, or someone who follows his own inspiration, refusing political cooptation. Secondly, within the intricate national politics of Niger, a public claim to be apolitical excuses him from endorsing specifi c candidates or government offi cials over others. Th is is crucial in a nation-state in its Seventh Republic, especially since fi ve of the eight successive governments have come into power since the beginning of the 1990s. Alphadi’s identity as apolitical is also useful in the international and corporate arenas, where he combines anti-neocolonial rhetoric and goals with diplomatic

8 In this haute couture ensemble he showed at FIMA 2009, Alphadi combines references to several African and European aesthetic forebears. The leop-ard print on silk reclaims the pattern as a representa-tion of great power, while exploiting its association with illicit animality to create a titillating sex appeal. Firmly within the tradition of French hand embroi-dery, the tunic alludes to Tuareg jewelry, resulting in a dress that is both protective and fashionable. Alphadi, Haute Couture Line, FIMA 2009.Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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appeals for cooperation from powerful governments, corpora-tions, and international agencies with agendas that sometimes abrade or confl ict with one another and his own. Finally, by stat-ing that he is apolitical, Alphadi downplays the real economic and political power that he wields in Niger.

Alphadi also has been a leader in organizing other design-ers. He became a founding member of the African Federation of Fashion Designers in 1993, and he has served several terms as president of the organization.13 Alphadi advocates for fashion as a promising avenue for economic development in West Africa, especially Niger, to international organizations, African govern-

ments, foreign governments, and corporations. In addition to his headquarters in Niamey, he has stores in production sites in both CÔte d’Ivoire and Morocco. He now participates in fashion shows dedicated to African fashion throughout the world, but the vibrant and growing network among African fashion design-ers of today grew from that small committed group that formed the Federation. In the 1990s, Alphadi began seeking support for a fashion show in Niger that he says was inspired by his former work in tourism.14 Finally, in 1998, Alphadi gathered committed teams in Paris and Niamey to organize the event that cemented his role as a leader in African fashion.

CREATIVE MADNESS:

THE FESTIVAL INTERNATIONAL DE LA MODE AFRICAINE

In 1998, the fi rst FIMA took place in the desert outside of Aga-dez from November 12–14. As intended, FIMA defi ed charac-terizations of Niger as a periphery to the global economy or to global cultural systems, even as it exploited fantasies of a remote, exotic, and ahistorical Niger that seemingly had never been part of global fashion systems before. Alphadi oft en refers to the fes-tival as a “folie créative,” or creative madness, hosting an inter-national festival in the remote location outside of Agadez at a moment of political uncertainty in the area and in Niger as a whole. Yves Saint Laurent attended the fi rst FIMA, and the fes-tival, which was funded by UNESCO, the French government,

9 In his work, Alphadi has frequently alluded to Wodaabe embroidery, which generally is constituted of colorful cotton thread applied in complex motifs on a hand-dyed indigo background. Tunic, Wodaabe, 20th century; cotton, 87.6 cm x 116.2 cm. 1993.372.Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

10 Alphadi’s designs allude to a range of Tuareg jewelry, and the 2009 ensemble recalls amulets that combine met-als, such as this one made with copper and iron.Tcherot (amulet), Kel Antessar Tuareg, 20th century; copper, iron, and cotton. 48 cm x 14 cm x 2 cm. Collected by Henri Lhote near Timbuktu. Musée du quai Branly Accession Number 71.1941.19.1967.Photo: Courtesy of the Musée du quai Branly.

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the Chinese government, Absolut Vodka, Yves Saint Laurent, and other donors, included African designers like Pathé O and Oumou Sy along with European participants like Christian Dior and Kenzo. From the beginning, Alphadi promoted FIMA as a way to promote “Culture—Peace—Development.” By inviting and involving Saint Laurent, Alphadi cleverly acknowledged Saint Laurent’s deep connections to Africa throughout his life and his contributions to the fashion world’s recognition of the worth in African aesthetics. Saint Laurent’s presence and spon-sorship also attested to the need for a shift in power so that Afri-cans could economically benefi t from African designs just as successfully as Saint Laurent had.

Alphadi later explained that he founded FIMA to show that “we Africans, we also can do this. We are also geniuses … We can do this. FIMA gives a positive image of Niger. Why shouldn’t we have a great designer? Why shouldn’t we produce things here instead of in China?” (Seidnaly 2009). That first FIMA increased Alphadi’s international profi le, and increased his fame

within Niger too. He won a prestigious Prince Claus Award in the Netherlands in December 1998. Highlighting African designers as equals to a few European stars who also showed collections, FIMA seemed a complete success. When the preparations began, there was an uneasy unoffi cial truce between the Nigerien gov-ernment and Tuareg rebels. Th e small air-port in Agadez was closed. Alphadi cites the preparations for the fi rst FIMA, which promised to bring attention, tourism, and economic development to the area, as a contributing factor to the June 8, 1998 peace settlement. Th e airport reopened, and an eighty-kilometer road was paved for FIMA. Aft erwards, Alphadi gave away the numerous tents and mattresses to neighboring communities, most of whom were nomadic or seminomadic (FIMA 2009b). This was fashion for peace, indeed.

However, many Nigeriens were skep-tical of FIMA, and they resented the amount of money being spent on a cel-

ebration of luxury in a nation where so many could not feed themselves. Th e scantily clad models inspired great disapproval from many people who adhered to increasingly strict stan-dards of modesty. Rumors began that all of the men involved with FIMA were homosexual and all of the models were pros-titutes (Cooper 2002:17). Th e resistance to FIMA was itself part of a complex global economic and ideological landscape. In the 1990s, Nigeriens resented the increasing control of the World Bank, the IMF, and the United States over their government, and FIMA seemed to many like just one more foreign project ignor-ing Nigerien perspectives, despite Alphadi’s leadership (Cooper 2002:4, 15).

In 2000, Alphadi presented a preview of FIMA to President Mamadou Tandja, who backed the festival, which was to take place in Niamey this time. FIMA had a new logo, in which the “M” in “FIMA” was the silhouette of a tagulmust, commodify-ing the garment as a symbol of both Tuareg and Nigerien iden-tity and simultaneously emptying it of an actual body. Th e logo

11 Who’s She: Tropics Mag published a special online issue profi ling FIMA 2011. On the cover, Alphadi engages and challenges stereotypes of the Tuareg ethnicity and the Sahelian region. Flanked by African models in his designs, he wears his tagul-must around his neck. Unlike the mysterious Tuareg warriors of Paul-Elie Dubois’s imagination, Alphadi controls his image, and he further presents an image of the Sahel as verdant and full of creative potential. Cover of special online edition of WS Tropics Mag, April 2012.Photo: Courtesy of WS Tropics Mag

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is a vacant tagulmust: there is literally no one there and noth-ing there to hide (Fig. 7). In the days before the actual festival, a few fundamentalist Islamic clerics began to call for protests against FIMA, and riots broke out in Niamey, Maradi, and Zinder. Historian Barbara Cooper argued that FIMA was the igniting event for violence against single women and women wearing Western dress, part of a larger protest by fundamental-ist Muslim youth against neocolonialism and the fundamental ambiguity demanded by the secular humanist worldview that FIMA represented (Cooper 2002:16). Rioters attacked women and threatened Alphadi’s life because they were more available and vulnerable—especially women, unlike abstract international organizations or the very real and very armed Nigerien military. Scholars and others have criticized FIMA for other reasons, too, including the prioritization of spreading consumer culture over other kinds of economic development (Alidou 2005:157, 194). Cooper also suggested that international organizations may like to support FIMA because the event presents an attractive, passive, feminized version of Africa that can be purchased by Westerners like one more natural resource (Cooper 2002:15). However, Alphadi intended for FIMA to reposition Africa in global fashion systems—as a place for designers, producers, and consumers. FIMA represents aspirations for African authorship and ownership of the hot and haute Africa that emerges on the catwalk.

FIMA 2009: AN ENCOUNTER BETWEEN AFRICA AND THE WEST

Aft er holding FIMA in Gabon in 2002, Alphadi persisted in Niger, and he continued to cultivate his networks of support on various continents. By 2009, FIMA was an entrenched institu-tion, having outlasted three governmental constitutions, and Alphadi was circumspect, claiming universal support in an eff ort to undermine ongoing criticism of FIMA. In 2009, Alphadi explained of the protesters from nine years before that

Th ey didn’t understand. Th at’s normal. My parents are both impor-tant Islamic scholars. I am Islam. Aft er the riots, we explained FIMA to people. It is an economic project. And now, they pray for us. I have had fashion shows in Mecca, and I go to Morocco for fashion shows all the time. We must not prevent an artist from showing his work! The most prominent Muslim women in Saudi Arabia wear sexy things and put their hijab over it. Islam is a tolerant religion (Seidnaly 2009).

Here, Alphadi resituated Islam in Niger with diverse Muslim practices around the world. By invoking Saudi Arabia, he legiti-mized his defi nition of Islam that is opposed to the fundamen-talist groups that continue to condemn FIMA.

In 2009, FIMA had special saliency because Africanisms were again pervasive in global fashion, and scholarship and journal-ism on African fashion and Africanisms in Western fashion began to multiply (Rovine 2010a).15 New York Times fashion critic Suzy Menkes observed that “African inspirations were the overriding theme” for 2009 collections, which she felt gave greater respect to African aesthetics than previous appropria-tions by designers in the West (Menkes 2009). Junya Watanabe incorporated waxprint cloth into his Spring/Summer 2009 col-lection, and Lanvin used leopard print in diff erent colors, while

Marc Jacobs included a vaguely “African” mask in stiletto san-dals named “Spicy” for Louis Vuitton (Mower 2008a, 2008b; Jones 2008). Other designers, such as Ralph Lauren, referenced colonial fantasies of Africa by reinventing safari tropes (Phelps 2008). African designers still struggled to gain the international coverage lavished on the Africanisms in European, American, and Japanese designers’ lines, but eff orts parallel to Alphadi’s own were proliferating. Th e fi rst issue of the Nigerian ARISE Magazine was published in October 2009, and editors organized the fi rst ARISE fashion show for African designers in New York that year.

Th e theme of the 2009 FIMA was “Th e Encounter of Africa and the West,” which was also used for the 2003, 2005, and 2007 FIMA editions. Th e theme suggested the ongoing multiple, con-stant encounters between the two imagined entities of Africa and the West, as well as historic encounters of trade, culture, and colonialism. By presenting the encounter between Africa

12 In the line that he presented at FIMA 2011, Alphadi participated in global trends of color blocks by combining bright silks and covering them with equally bright embroidery. Ensemble, Alphadi Haute Couture, FIMA 2011. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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and the West as the theme, Alphadi reoriented neocolonial par-adigms that limited him and other African designers. FIMA reimagined the perspectives of Africans in that encounter—an encounter in which Africans, too, are discovering and inventing Africa and the West, rather than passively being discovered by an imperial venture. Alphadi explained the theme by saying that this encounter at FIMA was

First of all, an encounter of peace. It is an encounter where I want to put love at the forefront, too. Th e European continent and the Afri-can continents were always in a relationship in which Europe was on top and Africa below. Today, we want to work together as equals, to work as partners. We want to make it understood that Africa also has savoir-faire. Th at is why the encounter between the West and Africa, it is a manner of being able to love Africa and to give a chance to Africa.16

Th is is not Paul-Elie Dubois’s peace, in which Tuareg people are silent silhouettes to ornament walls and magazines, isolated from

other African cultures in their Berber myth, but a peace in which a Tuareg orchestrates the representation of both Europe and Africa. Alphadi carefully attracts the interest and enthusiasm of Euro-pean, American, Asian, and African participants, donors, and collaborators, and while he advocates for an empowered Africa, he delicately avoids alienating French governmental agencies and corporations. Th e Chinese government was an early supporter of FIMA, and it has sent designers to participate in previous editions. While Alphadi continues to seek ways to work in China and with Chinese nationals in Africa, FIMA 2009 again prioritized Africa and the West in order to fi rst reshape understandings of the colo-nial past as Africans forge a future in a world with a very diff erent West than existed during the colonial era.

FIMA 2009 took place over six days and nights. In a “First Word” in this journal, Rovine discussed the festival’s character as “Nigerien in its declarations of support for local economies, Afri-can in its identity, and global in its aspirations” (Rovine 2010a:7). Th e Tandja administration was conspicuously present as it clung to power. First Lady Laraba Tandja was the honorary patron. Th e president himself used the occasion to name Alphadi a Com-mandeur de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques de la Republique du Niger, and the prime minister gave an excited, somewhat rambling speech before one of the fashion shows. Th is edition introduced a trade fair for designers and other businesses. Th ere was a two-day colloquium on business. Th ere was a ceremony to lay the fi rst stone of the École Supérieure de la Mode et des Arts. Th ere were contests for young African fashion designers and models, a key way that FIMA exerts infl uence on fashion production elsewhere on the continent (Rovine 2010a). In the featured fashion show, more than twenty designers showed their work, including Alphadi himself, Kofi Ansah of Ghana, Xuly Bët of Mali and France, Jean Paul Gaultier of France, Jean Doucet of France, and Jedda-Kahn of Brooklyn, New York. Designers’ works were very diverse, and like Alphadi’s, many of the biog-raphies provided by the other African designers explained their dual infl uences of African “traditional” dress and Western fash-ion (FIMA 2009a; Rovine 2010b). Especially in 2009, when wax-print cloth had entered the palette of numerous designers outside of Africa, it equally identifi ed garments as integrated into global fashion circuits just as it marked them as “African fashion.”

Alphadi’s own haute couture line that he presented at FIMA 2009 simultaneously built on his decades-long exploration of diverse African aesthetic forms and integrated his work into the specifi c trends of global fashion of the year. In one ensemble, leopard print stands out on a multipatterned silk that loosely drapes over the model’s arms, suggesting the classical West Afri-can boubou form. An embroidered minidress overlays it, cinch-ing the waist and hugging the thin silk to the body, even as it expands her silhouette around the arms (Fig. 8). With this fre-quent use of leopard print, Alphadi reclaims the pattern as an African symbol of luxury, protection, and status, even as he references Western stereotypes that associate leopard fur with transgressive and hypersexual primitivism. With this dress, the leopard print again refers to African dress in which the animal skin marked high status and power. Th is dress incarnated Afri-can authority and power over these symbols, despite the vague Africanisms circulating runways on other continents.

13 Many of the models, both men and women, wore versions of the tagulmust. Ensemble, Alphadi Haute Couture, FIMA 2011. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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14 The embroidery in Alphadi’s collection at FIMA 2011 alluded to the intricate embroidered, appli-quéed, and cut designs on Tuareg leather work by tinadan, or women of the Tuareg artisanal class. Kel Eljebira (bag), Kel Ahaggar Tuareg, 20th century; leather, pigment, and silk; 78 cm x 69 cm x 6.8 cm. Ahaggar, Algeria. Musée du quai Branly Accession Number 74.1962.0.1463.Photo: Courtesy of the Musée du quai Branly

Alphadi also oft en uses ornate hand embroidery in his work, and having alluded to Wodaabe embroidery in particular in pre-vious work, he does so again here in the minidress’s dark back-ground and slim tunic shape (Fig. 9). Alphadi’s embroidery is also part of the French tradition of embroidery in haute couture. François Lesage, an important French designer of embroidery, head of the atelier Maison Lesage founded by his father, and founder of a school of embroidery, was a supporter of Alphadi until his death in 2011. Th e vertically oriented motifs of this dress resemble the engraved designs on jewelry made by Tuareg Ina-dan (Loughran 2006a). One genre of this silver jewelry is the tcherot, a protective amulet that oft en has Qur’anic verses written on paper, such as this multitoned example refl ected in the cop-per and silver thread on the dress (Fig. 10; Loughran 2006b:194). Layered over a silk representation of power, the mini-dress became a protective, refl ective shield with the application of embroidered motifs inspired by Tuareg jewelry designs.

FIMA 2011: CULTURE, PEACE, AND DEVELOPMENT

About two months before the 2011 edition of FIMA, a fi re broke out in the Alphadi Complexe in Niamey. No one was hurt, and much of the building, including the shop, restaurant, and offi ces, was unaff ected. However, parts of Alphadi’s studio space, including where he trains apprentices, and some of his collec-tions were destroyed. In response to fears that the fi re would aff ect FIMA, Alphadi told a journalist that: “the festival is a key event for Niger and it will be bigger than ever … We are going to open Niger to Europeans and show the world that Niger is a safe country” (Agence France-Presse 2011). In January of that year, Al Qaeda in the Maghreb had kidnapped two French nation-als from a bar in a central Niamey neighborhood. Th e Libyan civil war had begun in February, and as the war in Mali would prove, there were many suspicions that AQIM and other militant groups in the region had acquired numerous arms. Th e main events of FIMA again were held in either Niamey or Gourou Kirey, the same village just outside of Niamey that had hosted the festival in 2005 and 2009. Th e security for the late night musical concert and fashion shows in Gourou Kirey was much more conspicuous than it had been in 2009. Heavily armed sol-diers and police offi cers lined the entrance and circulated the sandy grounds just by the Niger River.

If, in 2009, President Mamadou Tandja’s administration had used FIMA to claim legitimacy a few short weeks aft er dissolv-ing the constitution of the Fift h Republic and declaring a Sixth Republic that would allow Tandja to serve a third term, the dem-ocratically elected government of Mahamadou Issoufou was equally eager to use FIMA to refi ne its image in and outside of Niger. Just as Laraba Tandja had done, First Lady Doctor Malika Issoufou was the honorary patron of the Grand Nuit of the 2011 FIMA, and she and various governmental ministers were joined by foreign diplomats in the armchairs reserved for VIP guests at FIMA events.

Th e 2011 edition revived the tag line of “Culture—Peace—Development,” which had last been used in 2005. For 2011, Alphadi and his collaborators sought to emphasize FIMA’s place in Pan-Africanist networks over the meeting of Africa and the West highlighted in the last few editions. In 2011, FIMA intro-

duced a new theme, “An Homage to the Black World and Its Diaspora.” Th is shift did not aff ect the content of FIMA, so much as reorient FIMA’s portrayal of the globalized world in which it participates. Select designers of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean have long shown their work at FIMA, but the new theme lent additional signifi cance to the pan-Afri-can visions of FIMA organizers and participants.

In its fi rst editions, FIMA created a world stage in Niamey—a world stage directed by Nigeriens showing a hot and haute Niger that existed in concert with the simply hot Niger struggling with food security, uranium exploitation, political instability, and rebellions. “A Meeting of Africa and the West” hearkened to colonial power structures and their ongoing salience by seduc-tively proposing a reinvented encounter, an imagined fresh start. Th e theme did not address the accelerating importance of China in Africa, especially African economic life, and left silent the ambivalence many Africans feel about the growing popula-tions of Chinese immigrants, the Chinese extraction of African natural resources, and the ever-growing supply of Chinese-man-ufactured commodities (Alden, Large, and Soares de Oliveira 2008; Rotberg 2008; Roberts 2010; Shinn and Eisenman 2012). Of course, by 1998, Africa, the West, and China were all very well acquainted and intertwined. Calling FIMA an encounter between Africa and the West asserted African agency in what

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15 In 2011, Alphadi asserted that the tagulmust was fashionable to a world in which the accessory was increasingly visible in popular journalism cover-ing the confl icts in West Africa. While many Tuaregs were among victims and refugees, the most visible were those participating in movements for Tuareg autonomy or Al Qaeda-affi liated or -derived jihad. With camoufl age fatigues instead of indigo robes and an armed truck instead of shields hung on camels, such images still echo those, like Paul Elie Dubois’s paintings, of a century before.Tuareg rebels stand near a truck in Mali on March 19, 2012. Photo: Courtesy of DPA/LANDOV

anthropologist Arjun Appadurai would call mediascapes and ideoscapes (Appadurai 1996).

Labeling FIMA an homage to the black world and its diaspora challenged standard depictions of neocolonial globalization in diff erent ways. FIMA 2011 asked its audience to honor the impact of African aesthetics and themes on global fashion, in which the trends of 2009 persisted in fast fashion, from American Appar-el’s “Afrika” print to Banana Republic’s safari-themed work clothes (Adams 2010; American Apparel 2013).17 Th is homage to the black world further elevated African perspectives on fashion, and its de-emphasis on the West simultaneously acknowledged the parity between the West and China in their political and economic relationships with Africa. FIMA 2011 again featured a colloquium and in it, several French educators led a workshop with Nigerien participants exploring possibilities for the École Supérieure de la Mode et les Arts, the construction of which had been stalled over the previous two years, as Alphadi, his employ-ees, and other collaborators sought funding. Th e trade show was smaller than in 2009, but because of a new outdoor location, it increased the visibility of FIMA in the daily life of the city.

Instead of printing a program available to attendees, FIMA worked with WS Tropics Mag to produce a special online edi-tion in April 2012, which included images from most of the lines presented at FIMA 2011 (Fig. 11). On the cover, Alphadi stands between two models, and all three wear clothing of his design. Th ey are on the banks of the Niger River; an expanse of sand stretches over most of the background, and the river and the horizon meet their shoulders. Th e text proclaims “Alphadi, Prince of the Desert.” Th is magazine cover revels in the romance of the desert life, which is even more important for displaced Tuaregs and neighboring African groups than for the deep-rooted neocolonial French tourist imagination. However, this image also defies world stereotypes of the Tuareg ethnicity. Alphadi stands casually and stares back at the camera through his sunglasses. He wears his tagulmust draped around his neck. Alphadi presents himself to be seen, but on his own terms, as someone who creates and shapes what is around him. Unlike the

Tuareg men on the cover of L’Illustration in 1931, Alphadi looks back at the reader from this magazine cover. Th e models on either side of him wear bright colors that contrast with the blues, black, greens, and beige of Alphadi’s clothes and the background. Th e hot pink and bold red convey the luxurious material and cre-ative resources in Niger.

In the haute couture line he presented at FIMA 2011, the brightly colored silk ensembles cooperated with the bright color blocking trends on runways across the world that year, but remained highly original, with specifi c allusions to the artistic and dress traditions of Niger (Figs. 12–13). Ensembles for men featured tunics and loose pants, and both men and women wore the tagulmust and Tuareg silver jewelry. Th ere were both long and short dresses for women, and Alphadi again experimented with the boubou form by retaining the long fl owing sleeves on a fi tted bodice. Rasmussen has written of the tagulmust’s multivalence in Tuareg youth culture, where in the 2000s, a young man wear-ing a colorful veil, called a chech in Tuareg youth slang, defi ed the authority of both Tuareg social structures and the Nigerien state (Rasmussen 1991, 2010:476). At the same time, Rasmussen noted meaning attached to the tagulmust in ways outside of the control of most Tuareg wearing them, as some popular journal-ism depicted it as an accessory used by terrorists (Rasmussen 2010:477). While glamorizing the youthful rebellion and the long traditions associated with them, these haute couture tagulmusts downplay association with war in a claim on the garment for the global branding of Tuareg, Inc.

Th e 2011 collection again used hand embroidery as the key decorative element. In its bright colors and thin, abstract motifs, it at fi rst most explicitly refers to Wodaabe embroidery, but in fact, more formally resembles the motifs used by Tuareg tina-dan, or women artisans, in leatherwork, such as on saddlebags (Fig. 14). Th is allusion to the mobility of nomadic Tuareg, who carry vital supplies and precious valuables in such bags, refers to Alphadi’s own mobility as an Afropolitan with shops in Abi-djan, Bamako, Casablanca, New York, Niamey, and Paris. Fur-thermore, this line suggests a renewed urgency in Alphadi’s

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interpretations of not only the image of Niger, but the image of the Tuareg ethnicity. Tuareg musicians, such as the members of the group Tiniwaren and the guitarist Bombino, have gained a steady following among European and American music audi-ences, lending a rock’n’roll character to the culture’s historic rep-utation for rebellion (Rohter 2011; Pareles 2013). Th e 2012 Tuareg rebellion in Mali jockeyed for power with other stateless groups in a global political landscape dominated by the United States’ War on Terror and Al Qaeda’s Islamist militancy (Huckabey 2013). Th e politics of the region threatened numerous Tuaregs, who fl ed to Mali’s Bandiagara Escarpment, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger throughout 2012 and 2013 (UNHCR 2013; Deutsche Welle 2013).18 According to the strategy of Ethnicity, Inc. exemplifi ed by Alphadi’s businesses, the commoditization of the Tuareg brand is a key way that Tuaregs might succeed in a global economy. Clearly, although rich with potential, the Tuareg brand had mercurial meanings in 2011.

Th e Tuareg ethnicity had gained increased world media atten-tion during the 2011 civil war in Libya. Libyan president Muam-mar al-Gaddafi expressed ethnic identifi cation with the elite caste of Tuareg, and he had recruited them to work in Libya beginning in the 1970s. His criticism of the Nigerien government’s failure to integrate Tuaregs into the nation-state was one cause for strain between the two countries before relations were repaired in the 1980s. Some Nigerien and Malian Tuareg men found employ-ment with al-Gaddafi ’s government as mercenaries and soldiers, although many, many more worked in industries and commerce. As al-Gaddafi ’s regime fell in 2011, there were clashes between some Tuareg groups and the rebel forces, and before he was found, there were rumors that Tuaregs were guarding him or spiriting him out of the country (Maclean and Chikhi 2011; Meo 2011). Tuaregs in Libya faced suspicion and persecution despite their loyalties, and large numbers returned to Mali and Niger, where some began to consider rebellions (Associated Press 2011). Th e Tuareg image in popular media in the United States and Europe in 2011 was not so diff erent from those in popular media in France of the 1930s. Th e representative fi gure was a young man, a warrior, albeit in 2011 he was photographed with automatic guns, trucks, and tanks instead of painted with shields and camels (Fig. 15 ). Th is Tuareg warrior wore camoufl age fatigues—but retained the dis-tinctive veil, the tagulmust.

In his 2011 line, Alphadi asserted that, far from being inherently antagonistic to the nation-state, the Tuareg ethnicity is consti-tutive of the Nigerien and Malian nation-states, its cultural and economic contributions integral to both. For all of his apoliti-cism, Alphadi himself has consistently gained state support for his work—fi rst as a bureaucrat and then as an artist who has success-fully lobbied for the support of the Nigerien state and the embas-sies of other nation-states. While Alphadi and his work are not bounded by the nation-state, his nationalist support of Niger and his appeal to representatives of other nations has been key to his international presence. As a Tuareg, Alphadi is a conspicuous example of this ethnicity’s integration into the Nigerien nation-state. Alphadi’s incorporation of Tuareg and Wodaabe motifs and allusions into his work signals a national or continental, rather than ethnic, ownership of these aesthetic forms. FIMA exploits the strategies of Ethnicity, Inc. in order to represent Niger, Inc.

AN HAUTE EDUCATION IN HOT FASHION

Th e 2013 edition of FIMA, which took place from November 20–25, added the tag line “Creativity in Service to Peace in Africa” to FIMA’s motto “Culture—Peace—Development.” Shortly aft er Alphadi’s new Brooklyn store’s grand opening in January of that year, the United States established a drone base in Niger to use for surveillance of the vast Sahara in hopes of working with the French army and African governments to rout AQIM and other rebel groups. On May 23, 2013, one car bomb exploded at a Nigerien military base in Agadez at the same time as another at uranium mining facilities in Arlit. On June 2, 2013, twenty-two men, including members of the Nigeria-based Boko Haram, escaped from a prison in Niamey. Having left AQIM to found his own group, Signatories of Blood, in December 2012, Mokhtar Belmohk tar has claimed responsibility for the January attack on the Algerian gas plant along with these more recent acts of vio-lence. On May 25, 2013, damage to a hydroelectric dam in Nige-ria resulted in the worst power outages in Niger in years, and in November 2013, electrical supply in Niamey was still unreliable.

In many ways, the situation that awaited FIMA 2013 in Niger was more volatile than in 1998, when the ink had barely dried on peace agreements between Tuareg fi ghters and the Nigerien government before the fi rst FIMA. Alphadi’s rhetoric of peace had grown proportionately more explicit. He christened the fi rst day of the festival a day of peace, and FIMA participants and attendees wore white during an aft ernoon march in Niamey to call for peace. Th at night, he hosted an event entitled “Fashion for Peace.” Just as FIMA makes African fashion visible to a global audience, Alphadi now articulates African desires for peace for international media that oft en focus on confl ict and starvation.

In 2009, Alphadi exhorted university students in Niamey, “in Niger, in this country, we have enormous creativity. We have so much to create, and you can create it yourself. It is you, the young people, who are the future—not just politically, but also cultur-ally … What New York does, what Paris does, Niamey can do.” Along with the school that Alphadi has been working for over ten years to found, FIMA also emphasizes education through its workshops and through the prizes awarded to young designers in the form of trainings at fashion houses in Europe. He, his staff at the Complexe Alphadi in Niamey, and his employees and col-laborators in Paris and New York continue to work toward insti-tutionalizing the school and building its facilities. Th e school is also an important way that Alphadi hopes to change how Niger-iens, Africans, Europeans, Asians, Americans, and others around the world visualize and experience Niger. Alphadi is particularly passionate about educating Nigeriens about industrialized pro-duction methods and information technology (Loughran 2009). Alphadi’s vision of peace is one of education and empowerment.

In 2013, as his students in Niamey created fashion to send out to the world, Alphadi brought Niamey to Paris and New York in his new shops. Creating a world stage in Niger challenged the asymmetries in globalized distribution of aesthetics and com-modities, but so too does claiming venues in the recognized fashion centers. Th e aesthetics of this imagined peace grow from African artistic forms, Western appropriations of African artis-tic forms, and African mastery of global artistic forms. Alpha-di’s claims to an aspirational peace insist on the simultaneous

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temporalities in a globalized world. Popular portrayals of Niger and the Tuareg ethnicity normalize violence and strife, while the Alphadi Gallery dismisses this stereotype to construct a vibrant image of Afropolitans peacefully moving through a world in which Niamey is an important node in fashion networks, rather than a peripheral capital.

Amanda Gilvin is a Five College Mellon Fellow in African Art and Archi-tecture at Mount Holyoke College and Smith College. She coedited the volume Collaborative Futures: Critical Refl ections on Publicly Active Graduate Education. Her research in Niger has been supported by the Ful-bright-Hays DDRA, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University Department of the History of Art, and Cornell Univer-sity Africana Studies and Research Center. [email protected].

Notes

1 Personal communication, Tchimba Alka, 2010.2 Th e French military quickly recaptured Gao,

Timbuktu, and Kidal. Th ey began withdrawing in April, and they were replaced by an African-led United Nations Peacekeeping Force. Tuareg nationalist rebels signed a peace accord with the Malian government in June, but there were clashes between rebel groups and the army in September that year. Ibrahim Boubacar Keita won the presidential elections held in August 2013.

3 Joanne B. Eicher and Barbara Sumberg describe haute couture, or high fashion, as dress presented by professional designers “on runways and in press releases, fashion magazines, and newspaper articles.” Th ey defi ne world fashion as “ordinary dress” worn by “ordinary people” around the world. Th e items of world fashion were once considered “Western,” but because they were so widely adopted by the twentieth century, such a designation is no longer accurate (Eicher and Sumberg 1995).

4 Alphadi, personal communication, 2013. All translations from the French by the author.

5 Alphadi, personal communication, 2010.6 Most cheetahs live in eastern and southwest-

ern Africa, although they are also found elsewhere in Africa, as well as the Middle East. Leopards are more widespread, and they can be found in Africa and Asia (Hunter 2005).

7 Dubois was considered a “New Orientalist” painter of the “Ecole d’Alger,” and he specialized in painting Tuareg people in the Ahaggar area of Algeria. In addition to selling paintings, he illustrated popular books and magazines, and published one of his own (Dubois 1929).

8 Alphadi, personal communication 2013.9 Once made exclusively by Bamana women and

associated with protective qualities, bogolanfi ni is oft en popularly referred to as “mudcloth” (Rovine 2001).

10 Alphadi, personal communication 2013.11 In modern African politics, former President

of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko most famously exploited the leopard as a symbol of power, especially with his trademark hat made from the animal’s fur. He was nick-named “Th e Leopard” (MacGaff ey 2000; Roberts 1994).

12 Alphadi, personal communication, 2009.13 Other founders included Kofi Ansah, Mickaël

Kra, Katoucha Niane, Pathé O, and Chris Seydou.14 Jacqueline Kakembo, personal communication,

2013; Sidhamed “Alphadi” Seidnaly, personal communi-cation, 2013.

15 Fashion Th eory: Journal of Dress Body and Cul-ture published a special issue (13.2) dedicated to African fashion in 2009, which was based on a 2002 symposium on the topic. Kristyne Loughran and Suzanne Gott’s volume on contemporary fashion from Africa came out the next year. Authors in popular fashion magazines like Vogue also took up the subject.

16 Alphadi, personal communication, 2009.17 American Apparel introduced the “Afrika”

print in 2008, and it was still available for sale in its online store in October 2013. Journalist Brittany Adams said that the Banana Republic Spring 2011 Ready-To-Wear collection “took us on a cross-continental safari.”

Drawing on the company’s original purpose to sell safari-inspired clothing, the collection combined khaki utilitarian clothing pieces with fl oral and plaid textiles (American Apparel 2013; Adams 2010).

18 According to the UNHCR, there were approxi-mately 67,844 Malian refugees in Mauritania, 50,000 in Niger, and 49,975 in Burkina Faso in October 2013. All of Mali’s ethnicities are represented in refugee camps, but according to journalist press, there is a strong rep-resentation and sometimes a majority of Tuareg people from all social strata in refugee camps (UNHCR 2013; CBC News 2013; Armstrong 2012).

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"Hot and Haute: Alphadi's Fashion for Peace," African Arts, v. 47, no. 2 (2014), p. 40-55.

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