African print fashion, the subject of a new show at the Fowler Museum at UCLA , is so closely associated with a particular place and heritage it instantly conjures up an image in one’s mind. The bold colors and evocative patterns are sold in the open air markets of countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Senegal, and fashioned into glamorous pieces by local seamstresses and tailors. Yet as localized as these fashions seem, the make and manufacture of African prints have always had a much more global—and much more complex—history.

A Complicated Legacy

The story that is usually told about African prints is one that revolves around Vlisco, the Dutch luxury textile company and arguably the most popular purveyor of African print cloth even today. The company has been producing and selling the patterned textiles since 1846, when its founder, the Dutch entrepreneur Pieter Fentener van Vlissingen, discovered that he could mechanize the wax-printing method used to make batiks worn in the West Indies (today it is Indonesia). Vlisco introduced wax-prints to West African markets, and their fabrics are still best-sellers in those countries. The high-quality threads and beautiful designs make the prints popular among haute couture designers working in African fashion today.

Several scholars and cultural commentators have criticized the Dutch company’s prominence in the African print industry as problematic. Chief among them is the Nigerian scholar Tunde Akinwumi, author of the influential essay “The ‘African Print’ Hoax,” which argues that “African print” is a misnomer since the motif is based in non-African design and was introduced to Africa by the Dutch. Regardless of their origin, however, Africa prints have now been long embedded in African culture and are a source of national pride. Many of the large African print companies like Vlisco are still located outside of Africa—but Betsy Quick, a co-curator of the Fowler exhibition, points out that in Africa the decision for where to source fashion is often a political one, with some sellers only carrying African-made prints.

By contrast, others see the relationship between Vlisco, the African vendors, and the women who fashion them in their own style as a symbiotic one. When I spoke to Dilys E. Blum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s senior curator of costume and textiles, last year about the museum’s Vlisco show, she echoed that sentiment. “By naming something you make it your own,” she told me in an interview. “And because the clothing is all custom-made it takes it one step further. On the body they are something completely different because the dressmaker or tailor has to use that pattern in a creative way.”

African Prints, Made In China

In short, African print fashion has a complicated legacy and a rich history, both of which are expanded on in Fowler’s African-Print Fashion Now! exhibition. Adding to the commonly known history, the show brings up more recent events—the controversial structural adjustment programs enacted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—which had an outsized impact on the way that African prints are valued, made, and distributed.

In the 1980s, the WB and IMF created loan packages for the majority of sub-Saharan African countries, which were experiencing economic crisis. The 1970s had brought a number of global economic disasters, including the oil crisis, debt crisis, and multiple economic depressions, that affected both the developing and developed world. The U.S. adjusted its monetary policy in the early ’80s, which allowed the country to compete globally and resulted in a flood of capital to the U.S.—but it also further decimated the economies of the world’s poorest nations.

Structural adjustment programs (SAPs) set out to fix the imbalance with a series of loans meant to encourage free-market economies in developing nations. However, the measures have been criticized for being a cookie-cutter solution that makes borrowing countries beholden to the countries they are borrowing from. Today, it’s widely considered a failed measure, and SAPs have shifted to a more flexible approach meant to increase the involvement of the indebted countries.