Tailoring Identities: Craft, Gender, and Material Culture in Urban Benin

FAIN: FT-278792-21

Elizabeth Ann Fretwell
Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA 23529-0001)

Archival and ethnographic research so that she can finish drafting chapters two and three of her manuscript on "petty" economy in Benin, especially the practice of buying cloths and tailoring them to made-to-order clothes.

This book manuscript project is a history of tailors and clothing in Benin from the era of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey (c.1600 – 1894) to the recent past. In this part of West Africa, men and women regularly bring cloth purchased in local markets to artisan tailors to sew made-to-order outfits for ceremonial and everyday wear. By tracing the long history of the objects, craft knowledge, and practices of tailoring, this project shows how the making and wearing of tailored clothing gave form and expression to modernity, urbanization, and political transformations. In doing so, “Tailoring Identities” reveals how international and regional markets in cloth and clothing intersected with colonial, national, and local politics, as well as regimes of taste and shifting notions of identity and affinity. Employing archival, visual, material, and oral sources, this project posits that as tailors made clothes, they also crafted ideas and gendered experiences of self, city, and nation.