Fashion has always been used to send messages, or to exhibit social status or wealth. In many cultures, black at a funeral shows you’re mourning, just as a bride in white at her wedding represents purity. Victorian women wore corsets to exemplify their high societal stature. During the Vietnam war, military uniforms were worn first by veterans, and then by non-veterans, as a form of protest. And recently, during Melania Trump’s notorious visit to detention camps, where she donned an Army-inspired jacket with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care Do U?” scrawled across the back, the same item spread a completely different message.

But perhaps no item of clothing has gone through as many semiotic changes as the bell bottom jean. The pants have been worn for their practicality, to make a political statement, simply for the sake of fashion, and, when they were shamefully out of style, not worn at all. These days, the humble flared pant seems to be enjoying something of a moment: Forever 21, the Mecca of all things trendy and popular, currently has a laundry list of bellbottom options on their site. The comeback of bellbottoms coincides with an intense political climate, and a particularly involved generation of youths. This year, bell bottoms were especially popular at Coachella—a festival where the main demographic is millennials, people roughly aged between 21 and 35.

For lack of a better word, bell bottom pants are loud. When you wear bell bottoms you can’t help but take up space, and people can’t help but notice you. In a time when young people feel unheard and underrepresented, it’s important for them to be seen.

Bell bottoms are so aggressively associated with the sixties and seventies, it’s nearly impossible to imagine their origins have un-hippie roots. According to Encyclopedia.com, bell bottom pants have actually been traced back to the 17th century, when wide-legged pants were intended to be practical uniforms for boat workers. The pants were then introduced to sailors in the U.S. Navy in 1817, and they still rock wide leg pants to this day. The extra loose fabric offered by bell-shaped legs serves as a safety measure—in the instance that a man fell overboard, he could easily take his pants off and allow the wide bottoms to inflate with air and used as a life preserver.

Messy jobs on board a ship, like washing the decks, also meant there was a need for a pant that could easily be rolled up and kept out of the way of water (a problem you know all too well if you’ve ever tried getting a pedicure in skinny jeans). Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols. 

While the fifties were (and still are, for some reason) remembered fondly as being a time of good old American wholesomeness, sixties’ fashion defied those virtues completely. Youth countered the buttoned up, conservative look of the decade before and opted for clothing that made a statement. 

The bell bottom pant worked as a symbol for two reasons. Politically, a lot was happening in the late sixties and early seventies that warranted the younger generation to sharply retract from the mainstream. The biggest offender was, of course, the Vietnam War—a war that left the country incredibly split in terms of opinion on whether or not the US should even be involved and, to make matters worse, this young generation was still being drafted and forced into the war they so despised. Naturally, this left people angered and upset, and if the fifties represented post-World War II, buttoned-up patriotism, then the decades that followed turned completely against it. Instead of opting for the fitted pencil skirts of the more conservative generation prior, young people chose to literally wear their distaste for the current social climate on their sleeves. Thus, bold pieces like wide-leg jeans were adopted—defying the mainstream as a statement against the very unpopular involvements of the government.

Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols.
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Fashion historian and educator Sarah Byrd hesitates to impart too much power on singular fashion choices, such as choosing to wear a bell bottom pant. Even though clothing has a very physical effect (like I said, they take up space), Byrd explains that “many factors go into the things we wear at any given time as a consumer: what’s available, your cultural lens, how you feel that day. Like the people wearing the clothing, it’s a nuanced and complicated statement.”  

But what is often forgotten about bell bottoms is their role in popularizing unisex (or simply, gender nonspecific) styles. Brands like Levi’s made flared jeans for both men and women (marketed separately, though they may as well have been the exact same pant) and they became a part of typical wardrobes for men and women alike.

Perhaps the greatest example of this gender non-conformity is Sonny and Cher. The duo didn’t have traditionally gender-specific personas on stage: Cher’s contralto vocal range often hummed below Sonny Bono’s softer singing voice (and the fact that Bono was four inches shorter than his wife played into their almost “gender-swapped” stage presence). And at the time, they both were known to wear bell bottom pants during performances. Increasing access to color TV allowed people like Sonny and Cher to wear brightly colored, eye-catching outfits, showing their fans that one style could be fit for them both.  

The previously harsh contrast between male and female threads began to blur, which also coincided with a boom in other social movements. The Stonewall Riots had just happened in 1969, launching the LGBT Movement into action full-force. The adoption of bell bottoms into the contemporary style of the flamboyant sixties and seventies paralleled this movement. Not only were they marketed toward both women and men, but they were also regularly in the style lineup of pop icons. David Bowie, Elton John, Liberace, and their contemporaries were redefining how (specifically men) dressed and represented themselves.

Even Elvis Presley, whose style adhered to traditional gender roles through the 1950s, found himself in bell bottoms. Previously, he was an all-American man who was drafted to war, donned suits when he dressed up, and despite his somewhat eclectic taste, managed to maintain his rugged, womanizing demeanor. But he adapted the newfound fluid style in the sixties and seventies, often wearing his iconic wide-legged, bedazzled jumpsuits. For many, seeing pop stars in gender-fluid clothing meant feeling comfortable with their own sexuality.

It meant that maybe men don’t have to dress traditionally masculine if they don’t want to, and women aren’t bound to skirts and dresses. It forced the general public to come to terms (or at least, more so than before) with the fluidity of it all. Instead of adhering to strict, specifically gendered clothes (ladies in skirts and men in suits) bell bottoms jeans were made for everyone. Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace. 

Sarah Byrd agrees that the exposure of trends by means of the celebrity has always had an impact on fashion. She points out that in the early twentieth century, the fan culture around celebrities gave birth; theatrical actors and performers were followed and documented in magazines, just as celebrities and influencers are on social media today. Byrd explains: “In many cases [the celebrity] serve to ‘normalize’ more avant-garde styles to the public.”

Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace.
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In a 1969 New York Times article, writer Judy Klemesrud discusses a conversation she overheard between two teenage girls on the New York City subway, regarding what they planned to wear to an upcoming Janis Joplin concert. From their conversation, she learned about the role bell bottoms played in teenage fashion:

There are the ‘safe’ fashions that can be worn without scorn anywhere. For the girls: bell-bottom blue jeans topped with an antique fur coat (never a new fur coat!). For boys: bell-bottom blue jeans worn with a suede fringed jacket.

Klemesrud notes the irony that the “rock crowd,” which shouts about individuality, tends to “march to the same drummer” when it comes to fashion.

But one could argue quite the contrary. Young people do tend to dress like each other or, in the case of the Joplin-loving girls, dress like one of their idols. The music one enjoys and the people one idolizes are clear reflections of their own ideologies. When someone mirrors a celebrity trend, it can also be an association with what the celebrity stands for.

A lot of current trends continue to ignore gender-made style, again seen in the ever-popular “boyfriend jean” and even the male romper. But more importantly: bell bottoms are back, and their resurgence in the midst of an unsettled generation is similar to that of the sixties and seventies.

On one hand, one could question whether the resurgence of the bell bottom is actually a conscious link to the seventies. Perhaps the revival of styles is the natural ebb and flow of the fashion world; in a May 1980 article for the New York Times titled “How Pants Shape Up: Something for Everyone; Question of Acceptance” Bernadine Morris writes:

…Any fashion loses its punch after a bit of exposure, and women who had felt like pathfinders when they first donned a pair of pants to go to lunch or to work were to discover the same sense of adventure when they returned to a skirt or dress. To stimulate the interest, trousers changed their shape over the decade, passing from straight-legged to low-flared or bell-bottomed.

But on the other hand, the popularity of bell bottoms once again could have a connection to the seventies, whether it’s a completely conscious connection or not. Byrd points out that millennials are not old enough to have “originally” worn the style and therefore have enough distance to romanticize the references into a narrative that suits their current culture.

While not everyone who dons bell bottoms in 2018 is trying to boldly demonstrate a political opinion, it makes sense that the trend would return in such politically radical times. Though unquestionably stylish, sporting a pair of bell bottoms echoes  an interest in the social climate and acceptance of an evolving revolution. After all, clothing is never just clothing.

As a devoted William Morris fan, it’s been a delight — in part — to see Morris & Co prints brought to high streets across the world by H&M and rendered instafamous. Morris’ beautifully stylized depictions of nature are almost ubiquitous now.

These mediaeval-inspired designs were originally produced for Victorian wallpapers and home textiles, and their imposing yet delicate grandeur established Morris as one of the 19th century’s most famous textile designers. Now the popularity of this clothing collaboration has launched his work into the international spotlight. But just what tradition is being celebrated by H&M marketing his work as iconically British? Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?

In addition to being a poet and designer, Morris was also a revolutionary and friend of Marx and Engels. He was an idealist who argued that craftwork and cooperation would make wage labour obsolete and, far from being simply the “iconic [nineteenth Century] British wallpaper and fabrics brand” which H&M proffers, Morris’s company was run on collective principles and managed by his daughter May at a time when women were rarely afforded such power.

Capitalism has done to William Morris what it always does best to political creatives: de-politicized his legacy for profit. Admittedly his household designs have long been mass-produced and on sale in museums and homeware shops. But at least the mugs, coasters and tea towels were affordable symbols of affinity with Morris. They were often marketed within the confines of the designs’ history and therefore, by and large, did not so fully erase his politics.

Just what are we losing when we strip an artist’s work of its political context?
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H&M presents his maximalist, repeated homages to the natural world as emblems of British tradition and nostalgia, when in fact Morris used mediaeval aesthetics not to celebrate Britain, but rather as a protest in advocating pre-industrial values. The press, however, has followed H&M’s marketing wash, instead of looking to Morris’s actual political legacy.

Vogue termed it “another British heritage brand”; The Guardian, too, echoed the “heritage” language.

How does capitalism’s own tradition of depoliticization play out when consumers are clothed in imagery taken out of context but also place, having originally been created to celebrate home?

H&M is curating a selective history which conjures nostalgia for a Victorian era of Empire. They launched their Morris and Co collaboration with a campaign video boasting a grainy, faux ’70s aesthetic.

Skinny white women prance through what looks like the Scottish Highlands, a brook and a cottage to their backs. They wear silk scarves, maxi dresses, pussy bow tops: demure looks paired with classic jumpers and jeans. Then, in a move which reinforced the capitalistic juggernaut that is H&M’s marketing, the company then gathered influencers for “paid partnerships” at the Morris-decorated mansion Standen House.

This manipulation fits within fashion’s long history with the commodification of radical craft and the history of Morris prints is simply a case study of how mainstream consumerism subsumes radical aesthetics.

Two previous uses of Morris designs for clothing aimed to pay tribute to his anti-establishment politics by linking them to subcultural styles.

The first was in the ’60s when autodidact designer Mary Quant — inspired by Mod fashion and the sexual revolution — made a mini-skirt suit in Morris’ “Marigold” print. The second instance occurred in 2017 when fashion house Loewe released a capsule collection approaching Morris through punk style. 

However, both fell into the consumer culture trap where radical social movements were transformed into fashionable commodities for companies to profit from.

The aesthetics of subcultures — like punk for example, which communicates a rejection of the status quo and an alternative belonging — also resided within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Arts and Crafts movement (of which Morris was a leader) in their distancing from Victorian production and values.

When aesthetics designed to be imbued with a certain meaning are donned as decontextualized fashion statements, those meanings are signaled without an actual affinity for movement, without a desire to belong or perpetuate the aesthetics’ accompanying ideals. This transformation — problematic in itself — is the process of reincorporation which leads to meanings being written over at best and bastardized or erased at worst.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights
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Looking at the H&M collection, we can see nods to this lineage of aesthetic spin-offs, although they don’t directly mention the homage.

Their ’60s-esque mini dress uses the same print as Quant’s mini-skirt suit and their “Pimpernel” trouser suit recalls George Harrison in a “Golden Lily”-patterned blazer or John Lennon in “Chrysanthemum.” 

Morris’ politics inspired some subcultural affinity in the 20th Century but the sartorial trickle-down of these styles is mere commodification.

The anti-establishment message has disappeared when a mainstream brand like H&M calls him “iconic.” yet simultaneously ignores the radical politics he stood for. Indeed, when the company talks about “tradition,” they don’t even mean this tradition of subversive reuse. Instead, they invoke an abstract, white, and classist British status quo of countryside leisure.

Returning to the bigger picture of how fashion commodifies art, the connection between Morris’ radicalism and subcultural fashions like mods and punks is fitting — but not for the reasons the fashion houses intended.

Dick Hebdige, scholar of subcultural style, coined a term for the way capitalism seizes subversive aesthetics and turns them into a “fashion,” therefore making them apolitical, mainstream and profitable: “reincorporation.”

In his book Subcultures: the Meaning of Style he argues that youth movements develop their own style which puts across their criticisms of the existing order. The mainstream culture, however, incorporates their subversions within its own pre-existing world-view. In this way, the deviant meaning is lost. This sort of commodification happened to the styles of teddy boys, mods and rockers, hippies, skinheads, punks, etc., but it also happens today when far older styles with a political message are brought into vogue.

William Morris’s natural imagery — inspired by mediaeval styles because it sought to evade capitalism — now adorns the high street as season-appropriate florals.

Paying attention to the intended meanings behind art and design is important, especially when corporate fashion aims to depoliticize and commodify those visions’ intentions. Fashion is political, and the imagery it recycles, especially so.

William Morris’ creations were inspired by his belief in ordinary people’s value and rights; his words still appear on trade union banners today. Dismantling the homogenizing consumerism of fashion means celebrating the hidden radical histories erased by corporations, whether those be the politics of class, race, gender or sexuality.

So when you next see someone in that instafamous H&M x Morris & Co. maxi dress, they are — arguably — an inadvertent, living homage to a Victorian anti-Capitalist aesthetic and to those who sought revolutionary in the ’60s and ’70s.

There’s a thin line between buying pleasing patterns and communicating affinity of ideals, but if we celebrate and talk about these hidden histories we foster a critical eye and a celebration of the subversive role fashion should be allowed — and continue —to play.

When she was seven years old, Nike Davies-Okundaye lost both her mother and her grandmother. It was left to her great-grandmother—the head of the craftswomen in a village in Ogidi in southwest Nigeria—to bring her up and teach her the craft of adire. Ogidi is one of the major centers of adire production in the entirety of the country.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric which is created by applying wax, string or rubber bands to keep the dye from penetrating the exposed, open areas. Traditionally worn and produced by Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, adire is a delicate and time-consuming process that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Primarily a female domestic craft, adire derived from two Yoruba words—adi (to tie) and re (to dye). It’s not unlike the methods used by its hippie-modern sister-fabric known as tie-dye. But unlike it’s psychedelic brethren, producing just five yards of adire is painstaking work and can take up to three weeks or more.

Every day after school, Okundaye’s great-grandmother would teach her how to separate the cotton from the seed, how to make cassava paste—called adire elekois—and using a chicken feather, apply that paste onto the fabric to create the intricate patterns of Adire that are passed down from one generation to the next.

Adire was originally produced to make use of old hand-woven materials (kijipa); when a garment or wrapper grew faded, it could be redyed. When the missionaries came to Africa, they brought imported calico and it was used for adire, explains Professor Dele Layiwola in their book, Adire Cloth in Nigeria. These days craftsmen buy (mostly imported) cotton and apply the adire patterns onto the existing fabric.

“But no one wants to do it anymore,” sighs Okundaye—now 67 years old—on a sunny weekend afternoon. She is sitting across from me at her gallery, which is located on a peninsula close to the lagoon in the bustling city of Lagos.

“It’s just too much work and the money is too small.” Hailed as the “Queen of Adire” Okundaye is the most famous proponent of this Nigerian textile tradition, credited for making it known—and celebrated—by the outside world. But despite its creeping popularity in the West, its future remains uncertain. 

In the afternoons, Nike Art Gallery—West Africa’s largest gallery and a center of Lagos’s buzzy art scene—spreads quietly across four floors, boasting more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures and textiles all crammed together; it’s more a museum than a gallery.

But by evening, a steady stream of visitors, tourists, artists, and her protégés come to learn the art of adire from “Mama Nike” and the space thrums with voices and laughter. Weekends at Nike Art Gallery are unique and draw people from all over the city.

With Mama Nike presiding, young artists from Lagos and surrounding towns share stories of their work over food and drinks; it’s a way of dipping into Nigerian art and culture, with performances of music, dance and masquerades unfolding throughout the evening in the large gallery.     

“I was born into this tradition,” says Yemisi, a 25-year old adire artist from Lagos whose grandmother is a master artisan. “It was easy for me to pick up the technique, but I’m also training in painting as I can’t sustain myself on adire alone.”

Though the history of the craft is difficult to trace, adire—originally prepared only with locally grown indigo—is thought to have started in the 1800s. The tradition of using indigo for dyeing cloth however is thought to be at least a thousand years old in West Africa, according to scholar Jane Barbour whose book from 1971, Adire Cloth in Nigeria, remains an authoritative text on the craft.

While adire flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, it started to decline in the 1950s along with Nigeria’s indigenous textile industry, which was wiped out when cheaper imported cloth flooded the market.

The decline of adire is often linked to the rise of ankara, the hugely popular, brightly colored wax prints that have come to symbolize African fabric around the world. Ankara has a troubled colonial legacy, and ironically is not African at all.

The wax prints came into the African continent from the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, when the Dutch created a mass-produced version of Indonesian batik. These days, cheap copies of ankara are primarily produced in China.

Okundaye is warm and energetic, and always dressed head to toe in wrappers and headscarves emblazoned with the exquisite and striking adire patterns created by her own hand. A vital part of her craft she explains, is the sharing of its methods.

Okundaye has trained thousands of people in the art of adire by holding free community workshops at her art centers in Oshogbo, Ogidi, Abuja and Lagos, for the last two decades.

“I see it as a way of saving the art, so it’s not something our grandmothers once did,” she says.  “I also think of it a means of solving poverty. People who have no means of livelihood can be taught adire to make a living for themselves.”

But all of this is not possible, she explains, without creating proper infrastructure to support the industry; the government needs to actively invest in its future.

Despite Okundaye’s dedication to passing along the adire artform and its burgeoning presence on the more conventional fashion scene, she remains skeptical about the future of the textile tradition and has slowly modernized her methods to accommodate the lagging interest.  “When I saw that people weren’t buying adire fabric anymore, I started transferring the patterns on the fabric to the canvas, using pen to make the same designs that we used to paint with feathers.”

While adire is largely a forgotten and dying form in its country of origin, the ancient craft from Nigeria is making itself known in Western fashion spheres. In April this year, noted author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was invited to address graduating seniors at Harvard College, and she boasted her adire excitement on Instagram, heralding a newfound cache for this Nigerian handiwork:

“Honored to be the Harvard University Class Day Speaker 2018. And I felt fully like myself in this lovely Adire dress by The Ladymaker.”

For Adichie, wearing adire is a conscious choice and part and parcel of her activism; she launched “Wear Nigerian” last year to support local designers from her homeland.

Until just a few years ago, not many had heard of adire outside of Nigeria, but that’s slowly changing. Today adire is enjoying a coming out moment and boasts global icon enthusiasts including Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, and Lupita Nyong’o.

For a clutch of young Nigerian designers catering to the fashion conscious around the world, adire’s rich history is a compelling selling point to consumers; the craft is indigenous, difficult to produce, rare, and every pattern is a unique form of storytelling.

“Adire was once dying out due to the cheap textile alternatives coming from the east,” says Niyi Okuboyejo, founder of the menswear label Post-Imperial. “But many young Nigerian designers are now embracing it. The method appeals to several global markets as we have several retail doors in Japan, France, England and the US.” 

Okuboyejo is of Nigerian-descent and based out of the United States, where he has found a following for his adire-inspired formal and office wear.

“A lot of the symbols in adire have meaning and when put together could serve as a platform for storytelling,” he writes me in an email. The patterns in adire are a tapestry of the rich old stories of Yoruba culture, the myths, the history, the folklore, and the rituals.

“It is just one of the many traditional textiles that we still have. As it has done for Post-Imperial, it can serve as a tool to create narratives for the Black designer (especially one of Nigerian descent). Africa is the last frontier of new ideas due to so much untapped concepts and narratives within it, and adire is part of that.”

For designers like Okuboyejo and Amaka Osakwe (named “West Africa’s Most Daring Designer” in a New Yorker profile)—her label Maki Oh is entirely inspired by adire and a favorite with celebrities—the fabric represents pride in African and black heritage.   

Okundaye, meanwhile, is planning for the future in case adire’s current en vogue moment begins to fade like so many fashion trends tend to do. She plans to open a textile museum in Lagos later this year; she has already collected all the fabrics she wants to exhibit. “It will be the first of its kind,” she says, “a place to see all the textiles of Africa.”

She pointed towards her adire paintings.

“You can put this on your wall and remember the vanishing art.”