#Moshions<\/a>: Bridging the past with the future to unleash the creative potential of the present.<\/p>\n pic.twitter.com\/JfcPjTwFqv<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Moshions (@Moshions) February 10, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Moshions<\/a>, based in Kigali, was founded in 2015 by Moses Turahirwa. On the company\u2019s website, you can find contemporary men\u2019s and women\u2019s wear alongside bespoke and traditional clothing, including the iconic imishanana<\/a>. Even on ready-to-wear, everyday fashions, details echo Rwanda\u2019s traditional art and cultural forms, such as black and white geometric patterns also found in imigongo artwork<\/a> or in basket weaving, an inspiration to the company’s designers. Moshions is a \u201cculturally inspired fashion brand [which] uses traditional culture motifs with roots in Rwanda,\u201d business manager Dany Rugamba told me.<\/p>\n Moshions isn\u2019t unique in adapting traditional culture to contemporary fashion. But their “Future Heritage” campaign is interesting, and not just because it seems specifically tailored to catch the eye of the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures. Moshions aims, as the campaign says, to \u201cbridge the past with the future\u201d: to bring traditional culture into conversation with what is happening today in Rwanda, and what might happen there\u2014and elsewhere\u2014in the years to come. When I spoke with Dany, our conversation showed the tension between specificity and vagueness, in both time and space, that must be negotiated in mobilizing traditional culture for a global market.<\/p>\n Imigongo patterns.<\/p><\/div>\n Dany told me that Moshions is pursuing a strategy of \u201ctimelessness\u201d: \u201c50 or 100 years from now,\u201d he said, they hope that \u201cour pieces would still feel relevant at that time.\u201d The idea of timelessness in fashion, common to designers who seek a continuing appeal, echoes ways in which \u201ctraditional culture\u201d has also been framed. As the anthropologist Johannes Fabian famously argued<\/a>, anthropology\u2019s object\u2014historically, this meant non-Western, allegedly \u201cprimitive\u201d societies\u2014was once cast as a \u201ctimeless other.\u201d Instead of recognizing all cultures to be continually changing and adapting, those viewed as traditional were also seen as trapped in the past. Stripped of their history, these cultures were \u201ctimeless.\u201d<\/p>\n But in reality, no culture is timeless, and neither is the traditional culture that Moshions uses in its designs. We can learn about the deeper past of what is now Rwanda through disciplines like archaeology, but this deeper past somewhat predates what is generally thought of as \u201cprecolonial Rwanda,\u201d whose material traditional culture is preserved in places like the Ethnographic Museum<\/a>. As the historian Jan Vansina points out in Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom<\/em><\/a>, the Rwanda that we know today “is the product of the expansion of the culture of the Nyiginya court that began in the eighteenth but occurred mainly during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries\u201d (p. 198). \u201cPre-colonial Rwanda\u201d and its associated traditional culture, as used in the heritage sector and in popular interpretations, usually indicate life as dated to this period\u2014when Rwanda was coming together as the nation whose descendants live there today\u2014right up through the early years of colonization, which began with the arrival of German colonizers in the 1890s.<\/p>\n So Rwandan traditional culture as it\u2019s widely understood, and as it\u2019s adapted through fashion design, is time-bound itself. But the illusion of timelessness is the illusion of an enduring appeal: a promise of persistent relevance. And, even if the traditional culture that Moshions draws on has a specific temporality, the company is trying to mobilize it in the interest not of a return to the past, but of a move into a future grounded in historical legacies while not limited by them.<\/p>\n Moshions’ Mwimba dress.<\/p><\/div>\n This attempt to avoid being trapped in a highly specific vision of \u201ctraditional culture\u201d is paralleled by how Moshions handles its geographic context. While the cultural motifs that they draw on for inspiration are frequently Rwandan, Moshions deliberately markets its products to both a Rwandan and a global audience. Who, I asked, constitutes its target market? \u201cAnyone who is a fashion enthusiast,\u201d Dany told me: anyone from young, hip Rwandans, to members of the diaspora interested in connecting with their roots, to the broader pan-African market and the rest of the world. With the possible exception of Moshions\u2019 explicitly Rwandan traditional wear, the market is geographically and culturally inclusive, but the price points\u2014108\u20ac and up for a men\u2019s shirt\u2014clearly indicate that it is largely internationalized.<\/p>\n Selling to this market puts pressure on the extent to which Moshions can utilize or rely on noticeably Rwandan motifs, especially if, as Dany said, they want customers who buy things \u201cbecause they\u2019re beautiful, not just because they have a story.\u201d As a company, Moshions doesn\u2019t want its designs to be tokenized as \u201cRwandan,\u201d in other words, or to appeal mainly to foreigners who are looking for the exotic. Instead, they hope to contribute to a global conversation about fashion by developing designs which are rooted in an interpretation, or a transformation, of a specific culture. “We want to represent Rwanda, absolutely, and [get people to] know about Rwanda one way or another,” Dany said, but “we don’t want to make it feel very limited or very exclusive,\u201d either. \u201cWithout feeling very nationalist,\u201d he said, he hoped that Moshions could \u201cposition Rwanda on an international level and for a global image.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogg.lnu.se\/unesco\/files\/2021\/03\/future-heritage-300x300.jpeg\")
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