This leather pink dress designed my Mimi Plange, represents the dedication and beauty in traditional African scarification. The pattern on the leather dress mimics the intricate patterns of scarification of the body. Using pink as the canvas of skin of freshly open wounds, shows process/system of fresh scars to faded scars by the practice of traditional African scarification. Using the pink tone, as a way represent open wounds that are fresh, gave me mixed, conflicted feelings. A color that I always associated with innocence, femininity, delicacy, softness and then used in a dress to represents bloody flesh wounds, intrigued my interest the quickest. I also imagine that this object can feel very controversial, especially without reading or understanding the context behind this dress. The inspiration of this object comes from traditional African scarification and having the curators include this in the exhibition, was surprising, since right now, the topic of race is such a sensitive discussion. I can see/understand that many people would feel that this representation of their tradition, is misguided due to skin tone. However, this dress was made to represent the pink, fleshy open wounds and the patterns of scarification, not about race; but I do wonder if this would fall into cultural appropriation since it does participate in taking a practice from one’s culture and using it as an inspiration to make a visual statement but this can also just be a miscommunication between the designer and the observer.
