A look that evokes
both authenticity
and exotic jungles.


By RUTH LA FERLA

The Na’vi, the blue-skinned clan of the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s screen blockbuster “Avatar,” scale treetops and mountains, and even fly, with a looselimbed elasticity that Tarzan would have envied. At once exotic and familiar to fans of adventure films, the Pandorans wear latticed animal skins and brightly colored beads, and score their faces with tribal markings.

Jake Sully, the former Marine assigned to infiltrate the tribe, can’t take his eyes off Neytiri, a regal member of the clan. When he first encounters her clambering along a slender tree branch, he is drawn unstoppably into her world.

A similar exoticism is casting its spell over the style world of late, as vanguard retailers like Barneys New York, mass marketers like American Apparel and designers as disparate as Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten embrace pan-African influences .

Western fascination with African art and design has blown in gusts for more than a century, of course, ever since Picasso and Kandinsky filled their canvases with tribal motifs. As recently as the 1970s, Yves Saint Laurent introduced a collection of “African” dresses constructed from raffia, shells and wooden beads.

Now another Afrocentric wind is rising. “Its beauty is in having crossed all sorts of racial barriers,” said Malcolm Harris, the creative director of Unvogue, a popular fashion-focused Webzine. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. People are incorporating bits and pieces into their wardrobes and their lives.”

That may be because in the popular imagination, African jungles, deserts and plains retain a near-mystical allure, which the reality of the continent’s political turmoil and poverty have never entirely dispelled.

“Africa has never become quantifiable or entirely knowable,” said Rick Carter, the production designer who helped to conceive the Edenic universe of “Avatar .” “It still suggests romance, and a sense of the abundance of life. Threatening or benign, it has something to teach us.”

Hints of a global fashion trend first appeared more than a year ago in London, where the glossy magazine Arise, published in Nigeria, has been highlighting the work of African designers. A thriving music scene also lent impetus.

Like the American work wear and handmade jewelry that have also been popular of late, African-inspired designs offer an antidote to what Max Osterweis, the filmmaker turned fashion designer behind the Suno label, calls “a luxury market filled with brands that lately have become machines for mass-produced, logo-covered status symbols.”

Beyond the runways, that appetite for authenticity is showing up in clubs and lounges and on Broadway as well. Audiences are gyrating to the rhythms of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian father of Afrobeat, whose music and activist passions are being celebrated in “Fela!”

Pop enthusiasts are as captivated by the music and style of Maya Arulpragasam, a k a M.I.A., a Londoner of Sri Lankan origins, who has made tribal leggings and flamboyant African prints essential to her persona.

Maya A. Lake, the 26-year-old designer of Boxing Kitten, a line incorporating Dutch wax-resist fabrics and West African prints, drew some of her inspiration from the turbans and dashikis adopted by African-Americans who were part of the black power movement in the United States in the 1970s. “I often think about the political connotations behind those fabrics,” Ms. Lake acknowledged.

She insisted, however, that there was no explicit message behind her designs. “Sometimes,” she said, “fashion can simply be fashion.”







Left to right: A dress from Rodarte’s spring collection, the singer M.I.A., and a tribal-inspired Na’vi from ‘‘Avatar.’’/ FROM LEFT: BÉATRICE DE GÉA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; CHRIS PIZZELLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS; 20TH CENTURY FOX