This short documentary focuses on a 2008 fashion design workshop held in Dakar, Senegal. Artists, designers, and photographers from Africa and Europe met in Dakar to “partager” (share) their experiences with conceptualizing, making, and photographing fashion. Playing on the French term prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear), this prêt-à-partager (ready to share) conference focused on contemporary issues faced by African designers when they are conceptualizing and making clothes.

Ajalon features interviews with and exchanges among photographers, fashion designers, and visual and performance artists, including Zohra Opoku, Ndiaga Diaw, Astrid S. Klein, Zille Homma Hamid, Nafytoo Diop, Simone Gilges, Freidrich M. Ploch, Philip Metz, Athi-Patra Ruga, Ulé Barcelos, Lolo Veleko, Goddy Leye, Mamadou Gomis, Hubert Mahela-Kamba, and Akindobe Akinbiyi. Artists and designers share experiences as they focus on identity issues, cultural constraints, and stereotypes, all of which are relevant to the production of clothing not only for Africans in Africa but also throughout the African diaspora. Artists, designers, and photographers—male, female, African, and European—collaborate with one another and with the inhabitants of Dakar in cultural exchanges that lead to interesting discoveries about themselves and others. One of the primary goals of the participants is to find ways to deconstruct the often European stereotypes that have framed black African identity for centuries. Fashion artists from Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, South Africa, and Europe are featured as they examine the question, as one photographer remarks, “does man give value to fashion, or do the clothes he wears give him value.”

Ajalon’s film is interesting from the standpoint of the questions raised during interviews and discussions. For example, the interview with the designer Lolo Veleko from Johannesburg, in which she explains her “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder” exposition from 2003, offers a window into the fashion statements of cosmopolitan South Africans of little economic means. She notes that although these young people are economically challenged, they are able to create their “own identities” through their clothes in a culture that is often very conventional. Making beauty out of very few resources is a grounding theme of the film. Touring the streets of Dakar, Ajalon highlights the work ethic of many city dwellers, the determination that if one “cannot afford to buy it, make it.” Particularly creative is one young man’s reproduction of Nike shoes with a unique Senegalese flair. His florescent green shoes are handmade and sold in the markets of Dakar.

The film is noteworthy for its unique subject. Unfortunately, it lacks a clear structure, and this weakness impedes an overall understanding of what the filmmaker as well as the artists and designers were hoping to accomplish. While some thought-provoking questions are proposed that could lead to interesting debates around issues of identity, black African fashion, cosmopolitanism on the continent, and the exchanges in fashion concepts that can occur between Europeans and Africans, the haphazard editing makes a central theme and focus difficult to discern. It would have been beneficial to know more in the beginning about the conference in Dakar. For example, what were the initial goals of the conference organizers, how was the gathering conceptualized and/or how did it come about, and what did the filmmaker hope to achieve by exploring the fashion designs presented during the sharing sessions? Viewers would have benefited from a more profound exploration of “the spirit of sharing” which was, it seems, the reason for the gathering in Dakar. The quality of the sound is also somewhat poor, and this too makes deciphering the overall narrative arcs of the film tedious. This being said, the film does offer some lovely insight into certain meanings inherent in many of the African prints that one finds in the streets of Dakar. The beauty of Senegalese material (le tissu), as one German designer remarks, is unrivaled for its depth of color and vibrancy.