{"title":"Co-constructing fashion in a South–South context: selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique","authors":"Johanna von Pezold","doi":"10.1080/21681392.2022.2133735","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique (in 2017 and 2019) and China (in 2019), this paper looks at the ways that Chinese garments and textiles are presented and promoted as being fashionable in everyday business interactions in Mozambique. It explores how fashion is mediated in informal, South–South contexts that are largely detached from Euro–American fashion systems. Several different groups make use of their own specific strengths and advantages – be it access to capital and networks, long-term trading experience, business expertise, or an intimate knowledge of local tastes and trends – to sell Chinese-made clothes, shoes, and fabrics in Mozambique. These groups include Indian traders, West African individual traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese textile companies, and since recently, young Mozambicans, including women, who see the availability and affordability of Chinese-made products as an opportunity to start their own businesses. These diverse actors partly complement and partly contradict each other in mediating the fashionability of Chinese-made products, while jointly constructing them as fashion. Through this unintentional co-construction, the groups selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique carve out market niches for themselves, stimulate local dress culture, and diversify the way fashion mediation is understood, adding a South–South perspective to it.","PeriodicalId":37966,"journal":{"name":"Critical African Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical African Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2022.2133735","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mozambique (in 2017 and 2019) and China (in 2019), this paper looks at the ways that Chinese garments and textiles are presented and promoted as being fashionable in everyday business interactions in Mozambique. It explores how fashion is mediated in informal, South–South contexts that are largely detached from Euro–American fashion systems. Several different groups make use of their own specific strengths and advantages – be it access to capital and networks, long-term trading experience, business expertise, or an intimate knowledge of local tastes and trends – to sell Chinese-made clothes, shoes, and fabrics in Mozambique. These groups include Indian traders, West African individual traders, Chinese entrepreneurs, Chinese textile companies, and since recently, young Mozambicans, including women, who see the availability and affordability of Chinese-made products as an opportunity to start their own businesses. These diverse actors partly complement and partly contradict each other in mediating the fashionability of Chinese-made products, while jointly constructing them as fashion. Through this unintentional co-construction, the groups selling Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique carve out market niches for themselves, stimulate local dress culture, and diversify the way fashion mediation is understood, adding a South–South perspective to it.
期刊介绍:
Critical African Studies seeks to return Africanist scholarship to the heart of theoretical innovation within each of its constituent disciplines, including Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, History, Law and Economics. We offer authors a more flexible publishing platform than other journals, allowing them greater space to develop empirical discussions alongside theoretical and conceptual engagements. We aim to publish scholarly articles that offer both innovative empirical contributions, grounded in original fieldwork, and also innovative theoretical engagements. This speaks to our broader intention to promote the deployment of thorough empirical work for the purposes of sophisticated theoretical innovation. We invite contributions that meet the aims of the journal, including special issue proposals that offer fresh empirical and theoretical insights into African Studies debates.