A snapshot of South African fashion in Marabastad circa 1950

 

Clothes were often the number one item that migrants spent their money earned abroad on. The first months wages were often spent entirely on new clothes; shirts, suit jackets and trousers, hats.

 

In Pretoria, Yusuf Saidi had his own personal tailor, and would have exquisite suits made up. Influenced by the "Scottish empire" in Malawi, Malawians in general "were very sharp dressers." "it's very much a British thing, a reminisance of the colonial thing to be seen as a gentleman, wear a suit and be seen as a sharp dresser","my dad had an indian tailor - all his life"

 

Adverts in vernacular newspapers in South Africa portrayed suit-wearing Africans as modern, progressive. But Africans across Southern Africa in turn apporpriated advertised goods, confronting colonialism itself and subverting imperial ideology. Entrepreneurs, independent farmers, and nationalists in suits challenged the legitimacy of colonial rule, using sharply tailored clothes to appropriate 'European' notions of authority, but also establish themselves as well-to-do individuals within their own communities. 

 

In turn a younger generation of 'cowboys' in the late 1940s and early 50s used American imagery, wide-brimmed hats and jeans to assert their own generational status; this has been noted in studies on the Copperbelt, but also played out in rural Malawi. As such Malawians read entirely new meanings into the fashions they adopted from the British and Americans, and gained power from the imagery that they used.