Remember when
you tried to get creative and bejewel your jean shorts or decorate your
new tennis shoes with a Sharpie pen? Well this is not that. In the Omo
Valley of southern Ethiopia, the Surma and Mursi people don’t have glue
guns, sewing machines, sequins or Sharpies to accessorise with. Inspired
by the tools and textiles provided by nature alone, these ancient
African tribes manage to create their own unique fashion that could
easily rival and certainly influence the avant garde looks of Haute
Couture Fashion Weeks around the world.
These rare photographs of what is
believed to be among the most unique and remote tribal people in the
world, were captured by German-born artist
Hans Silvester.
Born in 1938, with an impressive career behind him, Hans has documented
everything from the ravages of deforestation in the Amazon to the lives
of women in the Great Indian Desert.
For his most recent work featuring the Surma and Mursi
people, the photographer immersed himself into daily tribal life to
chronicle and “save…as much as possible of this truly living art.”
The two tribes reaching the southern end of Ethiopia and the
northern part of Kenya share a similar culture. Their homelands are
remote, located in desolate mountains in a largely unexplored region.
But as civilization encroaches and civil war becomes more violent, Hans
worries that these people will lose their delightful tradition.
They have practised some of the same traditions that their
ancestors did centuries ago living in the same remote area, but most
tribes now carry AK47s to hunt or protect themselves from tribal
rivalries, provided by parties in the Sudanese Civil War. Police allow
foreigners to travel there only with a hired armed guard.
Still, despite the inevitable contamination from the outside
world, the tribespeople, women and adolescent children in particular,
show an innate artistic sense.
Because they are a nomadic people without permanent
architecture on which to express their art, they use their bodies as
their canvases, embelleshing their skin with mineral pigments from
powdered volcanic rock and dressing themselves in “textiles” obtained
from the natural world around them.
Body accessories and spectacular avant-garde looking
headpieces are made with just flowers, leaves, grass, shells and animal
horns. They have an exquisite and innate sense of form, shape and
colour.
What I love most about this, is that it’s 100% original. You
can be certain the tribespeople aren’t flicking through the pages of
Vogue
or looking back at style icons of the 60s for inspiration. Their
fashion is truly inventive and they are each natural born fashion
designers.
Far from the runways of Paris and the
fashion houses of Milan, they are from an alternate fashion world, where
what you wear is subject to mother nature’s infinitely changing
elements, the colours “in season” truly do depend on the season, and
individuality is the only trend.
http://www.messynessychic.com/2015/08/31/the-ethiopian-fashion-tribe-that-turns-nature-into-haute-couture/
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