African Survival and Creativity

 Carol Tulloch has long had a fascination with fashion, textiles and Black British history and creativity.  This led to her developing the Black British Style exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  She also produced the book Black Style, which examines fashions and textiles in Africa and the Diaspora, which have influenced Black British style. 

It was at Ravensbourne College of Arts that I first became interested in Black history, because of the dissertation I did there.  I looked at the history around Black people arriving in Britain.  I was fascinated with the material – for the first time, asking my mum and my grandparents about their experiences. 

I then interviewed Paul Gilroy, whose book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack had come out in 1986. 

I was at school in Doncaster in Yorkshire.  We had to do a school project and, for some reason, I decided to do it on West Indian food.  Can you imagine, in the 1970s?  And it was fine, they loved it.  I remember doing samples of yam and putting them in these plastic containers.  There were no books, so I had to ask my mother.  I remember asking my mum, ‘What’s the average length of a yam?’ and she went, ‘About ya so’.   And I said, ‘Yeah, Mother, I can write that’.  She was messing about. 

And it was great because my Mum’s schooling only went up to the age of seven.  I only realise now that, her general knowledge of her own culture, her everyday life, was really important.  I hadn’t realised, by doing that project for grammar school – yes, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.  They have a contribution to make. 

Z – How did you get into design? 

CT - I’ve written a piece about dressmaking and I suppose it comes from my mum.  It comes from different channels.  My mother was not a seamstress – she didn’t make for other people – but she made a lot of her own clothes and made clothes for us.  And I can see her now, upstairs in the bedroom, calling us upstairs because she can’t put the thread through the needle.

Like a lot of people from the Caribbean, she didn’t use a pattern, she did what is called freehand dressmaking where you cut straight into the fabric.  So I got that from my Mum and the other women from Jamaica – most of the people that I grew up with were from Jamaica.  Just watching them. 

Then my Mum and Dad, and nearly all the Black people we knew, had a passion for clothes and dressing up and putting items together. 

And then things like – in Doncaster, there’s a museum right near the dentist’s.  So we would go to the dentist and then my Mum would sneak us off just for a short while to the museum.  She used to like looking at the glassware.  So  I was introduced to that sort of thing.  I’m sure lots of other Black people say the same sort of thing, whether consciously or not – that thing of going to the market with your mother, buying fabric, buying ceramics.  

CT - Sonia Boyce lives in London, and she talks about going to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. 

Z - You never saw Black people in the theatre, in museums or in libraries. 

CT - If I bumped into my sister with some friends in town on a Saturday, just hanging around, she would say, ‘Where you going?’ and I would say, ‘I’m off to the library’.  My sister said afterwards, her friends would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, where is she really going?  Who is she meeting?  And she would say, no, Carol really is going to the library on a Saturday afternoon. 

If I said to my mother, I’m going to the library – and the librarians would know me, so I wouldn’t have any trouble.  Not that I can remember, anyway.  Here, in London, I went to the National Gallery with my gran, and I went to Westminster Abbey with my sister and did brass rubbing. 

My gran lived across the road from a Methodist church in Brixton where we used to go to Sunday school, and they used to put on trips.  They used to put on trips, and the majority of the kids in that Sunday school were Black.  So we were taken to see the original London Bridge, and then we were there when they were dismantling it and rebuilding it.  They took us to museums.  There used to be a whole gaggle of Black kids being taken, so to us it seemed normal.  I think perhaps it was unusual that this Methodist church were always taking us out on trips. 

Z - So how did you come to be here at the V&A? 

CT - I started doing things for the V&A on and off in 1992 or ’93.  Because of what I had done in my dissertation at Ravensbourne, one of the tutors there asked if I would contribute a chapter on dress for a book called Cheap Thrills.  And because of that chapter, the curators of the Street Style exhibition initially asked if I would come to a meeting to discuss Black dress.  Following that meeting, they asked if I would become a consultant researcher for the exhibition.  So I did that and then, because of that, I was asked if I would build the education programme around it. 

Because I wasn’t from the museum world, I just brought in ideas that were what I would do with students at the college where I was teaching.  So I came up with this list of ideas which I suggested to the person who was Head of Education then, and she liked the poetry in motion, the hair event, and the conference/panel discussion.  So we did those three events. 

From then on, I would do the odd talk here or organise a conference.  That sort of thing.  I then submitted the Black British Style proposal, and my post at the Archives and Museum of Black Heritage (AMBH) had ended.  Originally, it was going to be a joint project between AMBH and the V&A. 

The museum really wanted the exhibition, but they didn’t have the funds to pay me.  So we decided to try and see if there were any academic institutions that would help.  In the end, Camberwell College of Arts and Chelsea College of Arts came to the rescue and made it a joint senior research fellowship with the V&A. 

Originally, this fellowship should just have been for the life of the exhibition, but then the tour of Black British Style came along, so it has been extended and it ends in December.  We are still in negotiation because the V&A now want the fellowship to extend to 2010. 

Z - In your book, you talk about dignity.  These days, it seems to me that young people in particular all want to dress exactly the same. 

CT - I went to Johannesburg recently for South African Fashion Week and it blew my mind.  It completely blew my mind.  There, people were just going for it.  It just reminded me of how Black people in the UK were dressing in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  Emancipation - there it was expressed.  The way gay men were dressing, they were shouting ‘I am gay’.  And it was visibly written on their bodies.  People were wearing traditional African dress and mixing that with something with a little bit more contemporary twist to it.  Then there were African men and women wearing really avant garde dress, incredibly trendy clothing which they could have been wearing in New York or London, it was that international. 

Z- Do you think people are still doing that in London? 

CT – Yes.  London is still vibrant.  You can get that in Manchester as well, or in different places – you still see people who stop you in your tracks.  And you think, how on earth did you put that outfit together, it looks amazing.  It’s about that creativity. 

CT - I don’t know, I am asking the question.  Have we got to the stage where we are much more comfortable about who we are, where you just don’t have to prove yourself?  You can have a much more laid back attitude about it.  I don’t’ know if I am getting this right.  I’m not quite sure, I haven’t got my head around it.  Sometimes just I think, do I have to see one more pair of low-slung jeans?  This is being done to death.  Can we not move on? 

By having this sort of style, are you still saying that you’re Black?  You don’t need that now.  I was at an antiques fair last night and there was this young white guy.  If I had only seen him from the neck down, I would have thought he was Black. 

Z - What response did you get to the Black British Style exhibition? 

CT - Some people were really positive about the exhibition.  I think some people thought we had not put in all the key looks, every key look that had ever been created or worn by Black people.  That would have been impossible.  But I just chose particular individuals.  Sometimes I kept using the same individual who would just repeat as you went through the exhibition.  So they were telling a particular kind of story. 

You’ve got to remember it was the first time it had been done.  Also, I wanted it to be a visual experience as well.  It’s difficult and in some ways, I am still reeling – I forgot what it’s like to put things out there.  You come across as a spokesperson, and I didn’t want to be in that position at all.  That exhibition was not the be-all and end-all.  It had better not be!  I hope it will be an inspiration for other people to do things around dress.  People are looking at this subject. 

Z – What are your plans for the future? 

CT – I am writing a book around dress in the African Diaspora.

There will be an exhibition throughout 2007 and the museum will be holding a conference about design and slavery.  Three artists will be responding to African diasporic objects within the museum. 

Victoria and Albert Museum 

Uncomfortable Truths – the shadow of slave trading on contemporary art & design