Customer Reviews

African Costumes and Textiles: From the Berbers to the Zulus

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African Costumes and Textiles has excellent photos of some extraordinary items of wear in the collection of Zaira and Marcel Mis. Most are first rate, some are more mundane. Taken together, they are a reasonable sampling of the extraordinary woven traditions of the continent. What the book lacks, and it is a serious omission, is an amplified context, including approximate dates of creation of the items presented. We are given limited information about their creation and use, no photography of them in situ on actual folks. The costumes are treated as works of art and photographed that way, which is fair enough. But they were originally functional pieces that were meant to be draped, wrapped and sat upon human bodies, whether for prestige, protection, or any number of other uses. It would have been good to also have a statement from the collectors themselves about their perspectives on these pieces and their reasons for acquiring them. There are a few editing errors, probably things lost in translation from what I was presumed originally French; editing errors that should have been caught in an otherwise well-made and luscious book.