Displaced South African Andrew Dosunmu — fashion stylist and music video director — is hot property in New York. He spoke to Tony Karon
ANDREW DOSUNMU is pacing around his sparse studio apartment in Manhattan’s fashion district, anxious for feedback on his directorial debut music video.
There is no furniture beyond the functional — a futon, a drawing board, a music system, a large television
On the TV, the wicked bass-and-wah-wah-guitar rhythm of the legendary Isaac Hayes’ new single, Funky Junky, drives a moody montage of expressionist, monochrome images of African diaspora city life. The video is brilliant, and not surprisingly, it has opened a new dimension to Dosunmu’s career.
Before Funky Junky, he had only directed a couple of short films and commercials for Gitanes and Revlon. But his work as a fashion stylist has earned Dosunmu a reputation as one of the most exciting influences on New York’s aesthetic landscape.
Born in England of exiled South African parents, Dosunmu grew up closer to London’s rebellious Jamaican “rude boys” than his parents’ exile milieu. After studying fashion at St Martin’s College, he worked for six years in the Paris design studio of Yves St
“Then I realised it wasn’t clothes I liked. It was the overall image, the look, that attracted me to fashion,” he explained. Which took him to New York to work as a freelance stylist. Within two years, his work has livened up the pages of magazines ranging from bibles of downtown cool like Paper and VIBE, to establishment fashion vehicles like Vogue, L’Uomo and Esquire. He styled the designs of his friend Antoine Xuly Bet for Robert Altman’s film Pret-a-Porter (the “subway” show presented by Forrest Whittaker’s character).
Dosunmu uses unconventional settings for designer ranges — the rugged slackness of the reggae dancehall, the menacing camaraderie of young street gangsters, the feisty elegance of Puerto Rican girls in the hood.
Last year, the New York Times included him among five young stylists turning fashion on its head, and throughout our interview his answering machine fields calls from fashion editors begging him to bring his signature to their pages.
Where once stylists simply finished off the edges of fashion shoots, today their ability to move between the worlds of couture, film and music videos has propelled them to centre stage in defining fashion.
Dosunmu and his contemporaries create the context for fashion by grounding it in street-culture and urban realities, lacing it with post-modern ironies and appreciating clothing as a vocabulary for identity.
“Designers tend to design clothes, not the spirit in which they’re worn,” Dosunmu explains. “It is up to the stylist to suggest that spirit.
“You’re not just showing clothes; you’re creating a feeling, an ambience which evokes a lifestyle. Stylists are responsible for the content of the spread — putting the clothes together, and making sense of them. The stylist is really the creative director of a fashion shoot.”
The “look” of a music video is as important as its sound in relaying messages, and this puts stylists at the centre. As the visual principles of music videos began to dominate other media, stylists found themselves interlocutors between the worlds of music, fashion, the visual media and street culture.
Today the fashion industry depends on them to interpret clothing for a media-savvy market. Which changes the rules of fashion: “Anybody can be fashionable,” says Dosunmu. “You just have to have the money. But a lot of the people who have money and buy the clothes don’t necessarily have style — often they look ridiculous in them. Most people who’s style I admire, when I ask them where they got their clothes, it’s the shop next door or a thrift store. But they put it together so
Style, he says, is about putting things together, about using clothes to communicate.
Dosunmu and his contemporaries often wrench clothes out of the elite couture context in which they were created, setting them on the streets, mixing them up with thrift store and no-name brand basics. (Dosunmu is as likely to use neighbourhood kids as professional models on his shoots).
His aesthetic is unmistakeably African: “African people are not generally fashionable, but they’re very stylish. That’s a big influence in my life. As a teenager in England, I rejected the whole South Africa connection. I wanted to be like everyone around me. But the fact that I’m African was there unconsciously, and it came out in my work without me realising it at first. Which means that I appreciate it much more …”
A concern with styling is common throughout Africa. An underpaid worker living in a squatter camp in Kinshasa may wear an Armani suit (often showing the label) or pair of shoes or sunglasses. It’s a way of constructing an identity, appearing to defy the limits on the individual’s mobility. The deployment of styles can also have a playfully subversive component: in colonial and post-colonial Africa, there is a long tradition of the dominated appropriating the outward symbols of power in order to mock that power and render it hollow.
“I love that culture clash,” Dosunmu enthuses. “Think about what it means when you see a rugged African youth in a bowler hat. Or a guy in a traditional West African gown wearing mirror lens Ray Bans …”
Style is used to construct identity throughout Africa and the African diaspora. In the US, for example, the Black Panther party carried guns to fight racism, but their dress codes revealed a deep awareness of the power of images: the Panthers’ leather blazers and striped T-shirts, bandoliers and berets are an unmistakeable reference to the Hollywood representation of the French Resistance and other anti-Nazi partisans of World War II.
Similarly, the fact that Sophiatown gangsters of the 1950s opted for Hollywood gangster styling reflects a symbolic defiance of white authority, by appropriating the styles of white society’s nightmare figures.
It is a game that Dosunmu enjoys playing himself: “I went to a wedding the other day, wearing a three-piece suit and tie — I looked like something off Saville Row. It was a trip, teasing the powers that be, saying ‘I could look like that too’ … And straight after, I went to a reggae dance, dressed like that. And all the boys were like ‘whoa, gwaan rasta’. Knowing I could walk out of there and on the street some policeman would call me ‘sir’ because he would think I was some hotshot …”
Dosunmu’s fascination with African aesthetics has taken him on travels throughout West Africa, and last November, he finally ventured ‘home’. A shoot for VIBE magazine took him to Cape Town for two weeks, where he used township youths to model casuals and sportswear by top New York designers. “I felt very at home in South Africa, and I’ve got to get back there to make a film,” he enthuses.
Although more music videos and films figure high on his agenda, styling is still his great love. “I want to encourage people to take a new look at what’s around them, and express themselves with their clothes.”
If stylists’ power to evoke meanings with clothing derives from their ability to move between worlds, then Dosunmu’s diaspora African experience (a dislocated South African in London, Paris and New York) has given him a unique vision.
“I think the reason people like my work is because I’m an ethnic, an outsider, and because of that I’m very aware of any ethnic culture, or other outsider cultures like gay and lesbian. I’m sensitive to outsider cultures, and today people are looking for that.”
With that, he dons a furry homburg hat and pedals off through the fashion district on a bicycle of the type used by South African postmen during the 1960s. A bicycle which, in the vocab of style, could be translated as a wink.