Jansen, A. (2019) Decolonising Fashion: Defying the ‘White Man’s Gaze’. Vestoj. Available at: < http://vestoj.com/decolonialising-fashion/> [Accessed 31 January 2022]

• Fashion designers outside the established fashion capitals are repeatedly considered according to (the references they make to) their cultural identity, while European designers will rarely be asked to explain or justify their references in regard to their cultural/national identity.
• The so-called ‘globally recognised signifiers,’² be it wax-print for African designers, bold colours for Latin American designers or minimalism for Asian ones, are not only a stubborn heritage of Eurocentric imperialist thinking, but also a persisting means to differentiate, diminish and exclude ‘Other’ fashions from the dominant Eurocentric fashion discourse.
• These stigmatised ideas of the ‘Other’ are remains of Western imperialist rationale when colonised societies and cultures were defined as traditional (e.g. unchanging), authentic (e.g. geographically isolated) and ancestral (e.g. historically disconnected) to emphasise their difference with European society and culture, believed to be ‘modern and cosmopolitan,’ as a means to justify oppressive and abusive colonial politics. 
• Historians, archaeologists, ethnographers and even artists were employed by colonial authorities to document local cultural heritage and, as was proper to the time, did so in orientalising and folklorising ways. They stripped these societies and cultures from their rich, dynamic and often globally interconnected (fashion) histories, turning them into ‘people without history’³ and therefore ‘un(der)developed.’
• After independence, most formerly colonised regions united in nation-states for the first time and found themselves in need of a unifying national identity. Ironically, these colonial writings, representing a snapshot in time, provided nationalist movements with a ‘traditional/ancient/ancestral’ cultural heritage on which to construct unique and distinct national identities.⁵ This not only permitted them to clearly differentiate from the foreign oppressor, but also to justify new political power structures based on (constructed) historical grounds. By selecting specific garments, patterns and materials to symbolise national identity, while deliberately omitting others, the nationalists once again erased multifaceted regional diversities and historical dynamics in the name of national unity. Therefore, in the same way colonisers aimed to distil and organise a ‘diffuse and messy reality’ into streamlined categories, nationalists aimed to create unity to symbolise a unified nation, erasing complex histo-geographical multiplicities. Also, the same prejudices once introduced by colonisers to justify their modernity and superiority, were reproduced by nationalists to validate national identity and political structures as traditional and ancestral.
• Meanwhile, referencing cultural identity through the use of (stereotypical) cultural heritage has become an important marketing tool for fashion designers outside the established fashion capitals.
• These designers have been turning to their cultural heritages to establish ‘different and unique’ design identities. They have been especially introducing textiles and decoration techniques that were previously used in ‘traditional’ objects like religious items and/or rural clothing of specific regions, because of their association with tradition or authenticity and therefore considered more exotic/different/unique.
• Although all designers (including European ones) consciously or unconsciously reference their cultural identity in their work, only designers outside the established fashion capitals are considered accordingly as a means to differentiate and exclude them from ‘mainstream’ fashion. 
• Designers from former colonised countries are bound to use stereotypical references (as documented under colonial rule) in their work, because they have no knowledge of their indigenous fashion histories, which have all too often been erased or reduced to a static snapshot in time, and qualified as ‘traditional dress.’
• To ‘self-orientalise’ or ‘self-exoticise’ is a powerful marketing tool which works well both on a national and international level. Nationally it has enabled designers to compete with international fashion because it meets desires of localness that foreign brands cannot, while internationally it fulfils desires of the exotic or different associated with the designer’s country of origin. However, this practise also puts designers in a bind, since their marketability lies in their association with cultural difference, while this same cultural difference prevents their full membership in an ostensibly universal fashion community, composed of individual designers who (claim to) transcend the creative constraints of a single cultural tradition.⁸ The way anthropologist Claire Nicholas formulates it, these designers negotiate the reproduction of essentialising and Orientalising displays of tradition/authenticity, while claiming cosmopolitan inspiration drawn from other traditions, similarly simplified as Indian, African, Asian and European.⁹
• Hence, decolonising fashion is about the obliteration of the Eurocentric cultural episteme, whereby European fashion remains ‘the norm’ while Other fashions continue to be considered ‘in relation to.’ 
• The way Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez, two influential thinkers in the discipline of decolonialism, formulate it, (Euro)modern aesthetics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and the rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices.¹²
• A word like ‘fashion’ is not only not universal, but in its association with colonialism conceals a diversity of ideas and ways of relating to the world that does not belong to the genealogy of Western tradition. Aesthetics, they argue, as many other normative frameworks of modernity, has been used to disdain or ignore the multiplicity of creative expressions in other societies. For Europeans, the rest of the world never reached the state of producing art, literature or fashion; it is stuck producing ‘arts-crafts,’ ‘myths’ and ‘costume.’¹³
• So, evaluating the work of designers outside the established fashion capitals according to (references made to) their cultural identity not only continues to fulfil ‘the centre’s’ need to distil a diffuse and disordered peripheral Other into more rational categories based on collective identities, but also to differentiate and therefore discriminate and exclude, while simultaneously protecting its own boundaries. By setting this fashion apart as ethnic, Moroccan or Asian, it not only diminishes it and discards it as ‘not real’ fashion, but also confirms French, Italian, American or British fashion as ‘real’ or the norm.’
• Initial qualifications like primitive/folk/exotic dress may have evolved into traditional/ethnic/world fashion, but this does not make it less discriminating. As the anthropologist Sandra Niessen formulates it, binary oppositional thinking like dress versus fashion, traditional versus modern, Western versus non-Western, is not only a way to preserve the boundary between the West and the Rest and to protect Europe’s position of power, but also to ensure the maintenance of a conceptual Other on which to rely for purposes of self-definition.¹⁴
• But where the so-called exotic Other was at first depicted by the dominant West as a passive victim of its static traditions, it now takes agency and uses these traditions to construct and formulate distinctive and unique (fashion) identities. In the process, however, there has been a shift from orientalising to self-orientalising, whereby the so-called ‘white man’s gaze’ through hegemonic Eurocentric discourse is appropriated and continues to dictate what Other fashions should be and look like.