Sedition à la mode? The transfiguration of Steve Biko in post-apartheid fashion and décor design

The portrait of slain anti-apartheid revolutionary, Steve Bantu Biko, has been variously transfigured and commodified in political and consumer discourse since his death in 1977. This process is evident in the reproduction of Biko's portrait on garments and décor accessories. At the time of his death, a commemorative T-shirt hastily printed for his funeral was promptly banned. Three decades later, images of Biko's face adorned tank tops and cushion covers displayed in trendy, upmarket boutiques. The focus in this article is the appropriation and reproduction of Biko's portraits in a selection of South African fashion and décor designs. I ask whether the images of radical political figures are necessarily domesticated or denuded of subversive power once rendered and consumed as fashionable, retro accessories. If invoking Biko's name, as Ahmed Veriava and Prishani Naidoo (2008:234) suggest, is to invoke a legacy of struggle and sedition, what new meanings arise when historic signifiers of this icon are consumed as retro fashions? These questions are explored within the context where Biko's work and image are given new prominence by young black activists who were born in a democratic South Africa, but are not yet enjoying the freedoms that Biko's generation fought and died for.


Introduction
As a prominent and vocal opponent of apartheid and white racism, Steve Biko (1946Biko ( -1977 was under a banning order from the state and vilified in the Nationalist-supporting press as a terrorist and an embodiment of swart gevaar (black menace). At the time of his death in 1977, few South Africans might have imagined that his portrait would one day adorn trendy fashions and décor accessories. In the decades after his death in police detention, Biko's image underwent dramatic transfiguration and commodification in both political and consumer discourse. This process is evident in the reproduction of Biko's portrait on dress and décor, ranging from activist T-shirts in the late 1970s, to tank tops, cushion covers and tote bags forty years later. In this article, I look at four instances where Biko's image was reproduced on fashion and décor. 1 The four examples are chosen for their prominence within significant moments in South Africa's recent history.
The various motivations for reproducing his image on dress and décor items, and the drastic shifts in the uses and meanings of the items, coincide with the significant changes that occurred in both South African politics and design in the late twentieth-century.
In this analysis, I aim to demonstrate how the appropriation of Biko's image and (re-) activation of its different meanings intersect with the shifting significance of Biko's legacy in political, popular and consumer discourse. 2 The first example I discuss is a T-shirt printed for Biko's funeral by Robin Holmes, on While several authors (see Nuttall 2004;Vincent 2012;Rovine 2015) have written about Stoned Cherrie's Drum collection, the appropriation of Biko's portrait by interior designers has not been examined. 3 This paper presents a reading of home décor decorated with Biko's portrait as it might be used and displayed in the private, rather than public, domain.
I consider retro fashion's potential for new ways of remembering and foregrounding those stories and historical figures that were marginalised in Nationalist histories. I further ask whether images of revolutionary figures are necessarily depoliticised or denuded of subversive power once rendered and consumed as fashionable accessories. Can the image of a radical political figure -such as Biko or Ché Guevara -retain its power as a site of resistance, even when it is commodified and consumed as fashion? I argue that Biko's image has resisted the market's co-opting of social agitation against neoliberalism and anti-black racism, because it is continually re-activated as a source of revolutionary power, pride and agency by radical grassroots movements.

The first memorial T-shirt
Stephen ( (1987:48,144), liberation required that black people take pride in their blackness, in black culture and in African heritage, and shed the interiorised psychological burden of inferiority resulting from centuries of racist dehumanisation. 'The interrelationship between the consciousness of the self and the emancipatory programme is of paramount importance', he wrote in 1971 (Biko 1987:48 Biko's funeral would be the first occasion that his portrait would be multiply reproduced on clothing. From the late 1970s, T-shirts with a martyr's portrait introduced a new genre of visual culture to appear at funerals of anti-apartheid activists (Hill 2015:35). The T-shirts were mass produced on cheap garments and the often-rudimentary designs included the deceased's portrait, name and sometimes political slogans or an organisation's logo.
While the Biko T-shirt contains no text, it was probably the first such memorial T-shirt ( Figure 1). Robin Holmes. 1977  The shirt was designed and screen-printed by Robin Holmes, a former member of the liberal party who frequently did printing work for opposition movements. 4 In an interview with Francis Andrew, he recounts how he was approached by Importance Mkhize in the days following Biko's death, with the request to print memorial T-shirts for the funeral (Holmes 2011). The production of the T-shirt was initially funded by Holmes, who worked on a shoestring budget, hitchhiking across his home province of KwaZulu Natal to source cheap materials. 5 He printed his design on reject shirts, bought in bundles from Scottford Mills in Ladysmith. The thick, cotton shirts, Holmes (2011) says, were produced for the mines and were colloquially called 'mineboys'.
The T-shirt's design was determined by the purpose of the garment: to faithfully represent Holmes completed two small print runs and delivered the T-shirts to opposition organisations in Pietermaritzburg and Durban. After the second delivery, he was promptly detained and questioned by security police who had been following him (Holmes 2011). Two days before the funeral, the memorial T-shirt was banned by the state. 'To try and get around the banning', Holmes (2011) explains, 'I reversed the picture [because] then it was a different picture isn't it?'. Although a consignment of T-shirts was sent to King Williams Town for the funeral, much of it was confiscated by the police before it could reach its destination, and Holmes was charged for the production, distribution and possession of banned material. 6 The story of the banned memorial T-shirt reveals the Nationalist government's fear of the influence of Biko's powerful message -as represented by his image -on the black majority. Wearing the banned T-shirt would have declared defiance that was fearless, as doing so would have placed the wearer's own body in great danger. The risks taken by the patrons, the producer, the distributers and ultimately, the few wearers, of the banned T-shirts, speak of their determination to a cause and ideal that went beyond the individual, but was committed to every individual's emancipation. the portrait on the T-shirt would have been just a 'picture of somebody, a picture of a black man' (Holmes 2011). Without Biko's name, the specific political message of the T-shirt would have been legible predominantly to black South Africans and those in the opposition movement. Thirty years later, when models wore T-shirts with prints of Biko's portrait on a Cape Town catwalk, it was celebrated as avant-garde fashion representative of a new democratic era. In the next section, I examine the twenty-first century transition of Biko's portrait from political to fashion statement through retro commodification.
New trends, retro and Afro-chic in post-apartheid design For South Africans, the 1990s was a 'double moment' of change and continuity, marked by optimism and disquiet as government and citizens had to forge a democratic future from a fraught, divided past (Hadland, Louw, Sesanti, & Wasserman 2008:1-2). Shifts in notions of citizenship, nationhood, and cultural and personal identity took place at the intersection of the local and the global. In this context, designers were faced with the challenges of design in and for a diverse, multicultural society that also hoped to reintegrate with the wider continent and distinguish itself on the world stage (Sauthoff 2004:37). Notions of cultural and national identities emerged as a significant theme in design, and state and corporate stakeholders focused on fostering a distinctively local design aesthetic (Sauthoff 2004:35).
The context of the "new" South Africa, the optimism about the dawn of democracy and the greater personal and creative freedoms it effected, promoted new inventiveness and playfulness in design and consumer expressions of fashion consciousness. New fashion, graphic and interior designs -such as those of Stoned Cherrie -emerged from fastchanging contexts and spoke of the melding of cultural heritages, urban and rural vernaculars, and subcultural styles. Designers borrowed freely from the country's archives to create products that tell stories and challenge official historical narratives, while making a fashion statement and exploring personal and collective identities.
In the decade after 1994, writes Desiree Lewis (2012:74), the notion of "home-grown" in design, marketing and consumption reflects both commercial and subjective responses to national shifts. Designs promoted as "proudly South African" or signifying the "Rainbow Nation" featured prominently on design expositions, in lifestyle magazines and in boutiques. The local and "home-grown" were suggested in designs that cited and saturated hues in vivid contrasts, the overall mood conveyed by this magazine feature is upbeat, celebratory, and encapsulates the notion of the "Rainbow Nation", a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe the unified, diverse nation.
The designs in Africa Tombola also exemplify retro and Afro-chic; trends that fashion writer Dion Chang (Tait 2010) identifies as central to post-apartheid design. Lewis (2012:81) describes Afro-chic as a trend that represents mid-twentieth century urban sophistication and African modernity, often created through appropriating stylistic motifs, brands and symbols associated with black urban experiences. In retro and Afro-chic designs, select symbols and images of township life, such as dancing couples, jazz musicians, barber shop signs, or slang phrases, feature prominently. Borrowed material is often digitally modified to produce a bright, Pop art aesthetic or a nostalgic, retro look.
Retro, writes Elizabeth Guffey (2006:9-11), is a 'half-ironic, half-longing' stylistic device evoking of the modern, recent past in visual, popular and consumer culture, and it became a prominent commercial strategy in the last decades of the twentieth century.
In mainstream, post-apartheid design for advertising, fashion and interiors, the retro references made to the figures, fashions and brands of South Africa's past are often sentimental, conjuring a recent past of shared citizenship through consumerism.
Retro and Afro-chic also emerge in attempts to reactivate the past in the present and foster pride in black history, as seen in Stoned Cherrie's motivation for creating the Drum collection. The Stoned Cherrie brand was born in the years following the first democratic elections, in the dynamic, cosmopolitan Johannesburg city centre. Designs for their clothing and accessories combined contemporary high fashion and street style, the silhouettes of 1950s fashions, bold prints, beading and saturated colours. The brand was popular with urban, fashion-conscious young people who incorporated the retro renditions of local history into their personal sartorial expressions (Vincent 2007:88;Nuttall 2004:432,436).
In 2003, Stoned Cherrie collaborated with Woolworths, giving the collection more mainstream connotations (Lewis 2012:76). This upmarket franchise introduced the collection to a wider demographic, boosting the acceptance of Drum magazine as a desirable reference for fashionable consumption.
For Nkosi, turning archival material into fashion offered a means to transform not only the appearances, but also the consciousness of wearers. A statement on the company's webpage reads, [i]n an effort to rewrite our history we raised the humble crochet to the catwalk, By foregrounding people, events and achievements that were omitted or silenced in the official historical record, the brand was promoting pride in black history and beauty. For Biko (1987:28-29, 100), the destruction and distortion of African history under colonialism deepened what he described as the "inferiority complex" and "spiritual poverty" of blacks and, therefore, achieving black consciousness demands revising and rewriting black history. In the years following the end of apartheid, the collection therefore presented new possibilities for self-fashioning while simultaneously expressing one's trendiness and pride in black heritage. The consumer use of a scatter cushion also differs to that of a garment, which adds to the meanings the printed object may have for its owners. As one leans into, rests on or against it, the materiality of fabric and softness of the cushion makes for a highly tactile and intimate experience. Writing about meaning-making through the sensory viewing of photographic objects, Elizabeth Edwards (2009:333) writes that, '[m]ateriality constitutes the presentational forms which themselves structure visual knowledge'.
The handling and viewing of a unique photograph differs in many respects from that of a commercial product printed with a copy of a photograph, but there are parallels to be drawn. Meaning-making occurs in relation to the human body when photo-objects (like the Biko cushion) are held, caressed, scrutinised with fingertips, hugged, sat on, or slept on. When visually consumed through physical engagement, the image is re-temporalised, re-spatialised, and viewers invest the object with narrative and memory (Edwards 2009:336-337). Decoding therefore occurs through activation: each viewer will activate and structure meaning by linking Drum and/or Biko with narratives and memories situated within the temporal, spatial realm of personal experience. This attribution to the object-image may also raise objections to its domestic use: people leaning against, cleaning and "scattering" -never mind sitting on-the object could be perceived as insulting or harming the legacy and dignity of the icon. The nature and purpose of the object may add to this reading: a scatter cushion is an inessential object to be arranged, strewn, or tossed about at will. Its value is in its appearance and the comfortable support it offers those sitting on or leaning into it. Scatter cushions and their page 12 of 22 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 covers are promoted as a cheap way of updating home décor and they are frequently discarded once a collection or trend has gone out of style.
Fashion is frequently associated with consumerism, capitalism, individualism and superficiality, which are traits generally regarded as antithetical to radical, revolutionary politics and mass political movements. In the following section I consider this seeming paradox in relation to the Drum collections of Stoned Cherrie and Design Team, and I evaluate the potential of retro and Afro-chic commodities to tell and commemorate the fraught histories of black experience under apartheid.
Radical politics as retro history Raphael Samuel (2012:114)  What this retro trend omits in its focus on dance halls, celebrities, and dress, is that townships, such as Sophiatown, were also sites of intellectual labour, political organi- experience of oppression', that 'finds expression in our music and our dress' and 'that is responsible for the restoration of faith in ourselves' (Biko 1987:46). According to Lewis Gordon (2012:102), the political significance and the complexity of culture is, however, 'lost to presuppositions of popular representations of mores and folkways, where groups page 14 of 22 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 seem to "have culture", as one has style or fashion'. In other words, the popular and commodity appropriation and translation of symbols of black culture as a retro trend or "look", potentially thwarts black efforts at asserting belonging through culture in a public realm awash with consumer images that lack historical understanding.
The two Drum collections brought modern, black history into the realm of popular culture and public discourse in the decade following the end of apartheid. Their retro fashions and accessories presented new ways of expressing pride in black histories and historical figures. Irrespective, however, of the intentions of its creators, retro appropriations run the risk of reducing cultural heritage, that speak of shared experiences of oppression, into a "look" that is consumed and discarded as trends change. The retro commodification of visual records of black experiences under apartheid therefore exemplifies appropriation and commodification that both foregrounds and obscures, celebrates and mitigates black history.

An icon resisting domestication
It is not uncommon or new for designers and entrepreneurs who want to give edginess to their products, to decorate fashionable clothes with portraits of political icons, even when the appropriated icon's ideological position contradicts or criticises consumer culture. A prime example is Ché Guevara , whose portrait has adorned fashion and every type of merchandise. Guevara was an Argentine-Cuban physician, tactician of guerrilla warfare, communist revolutionary, and politician. He was a fierce opponent of imperialism, neocolonialism, and the United States. He spent his final years in Bolivia engaged in guerrilla warfare and was executed by Bolivian forces aided by the CIA in 1967. From the late 1960s, Guevara was adopted as an icon of revolution and radicalism by young European and North American leftists, for whom his image embodied anticapitalism and anti-imperialism (Memou 2013:449). Concomitant to the rise in his popularity among activists, entrepreneurs increasingly capitalised on Guevara's image.
Since then, Guevara's face has appeared on everything from album covers, tourist souvenirs, haute couture, streetwear, cigars and restaurant logos.
In these examples, the connotations of Guevara's image with socialism, militancy and political martyrdom have mostly given way to a safe edginess. Nevertheless, for Jeff Larson and Omar Lizardo (2007:429), the unbridled commercialisation has by no means depoliticised Guevara's image. Citing the re-appropriation and reworking of collective identities and ideological commitments' (Larson & Lizardo 2007:449). Where people are drawing from their everyday experiences of shared social and political struggles and invent ways to re-radicalise Guevara's image, Antigoni Memou (2013:240) finds a use of the image that is 'more resilient, resistant and hopeful', as it does not conform to capitalist market logic.
The chief South African example of the commodification of a revolutionary political icon is that of Nelson Mandela; in national history and mainstream markets, his image is that of the globally acknowledged peacemaker and benign father of democratic South Africa.

Connotations of militancy, violence and conflict have been evacuated from portraits of
Mandela -either as the young, athletic activist or smiling, elderly statesman -that decorate purses, clockfaces and keyholders. Rather than a symbol of radicalism and emancipation, for many who are disillusioned with the notion of the ''Rainbow Nation'' and feeling betrayed by the African National Congress's negotiated settlement, Mandela's image symbolises unfulfilled promises and the betrayal of the black majority.  Biko's image and work were therefore re-imagined and reworked for and by black youth in the post-apartheid, neoliberal context where the sacrifices and struggle of their parents had not delivered full emancipation. Black Consciousness, write Veriava and Naidoo (2008:246), is not a static method for change. Instead, they write, it allows for the changing, lived experiences of people to share and determine its own use and evolution. Black Consciousness roots the shaping of these revolutions in the everyday lives (or subjectivity) of the oppressed. It is this that allows us to mobilise Biko's words in our struggles in the here and now (Veriava & Naidoo 2008:246

Conclusion
Reused over and over, Biko's image, suggests Hill (2015:49), informs his legacy and its reproductions become objects or signifiers that activate and are used to 'persuade and affect us' in the present. The various ways in which Biko's image have been reproduced, appropriated and commodified since his death also testify to the desires, needs and dreams of individuals and collectives who experienced and experience South Africa's slow transition from minority rule to the complete emancipation of all its inhabitants.
To different owners and consumers of garments and accessories with Biko's portrait, the objects may simultaneously reflect any combination of lived experience, historical memory, fashion-consciousness, and political aspiration that draws on and critiques late-twentieth century resistance politics. These positionalities are not mutually exclusive and are subject to change as contexts and subjective experiences shift. Irrespective of whether designers used archival images for socio-political or aesthetic reasons, consumers page 19 of 22 Number 34, 2020 ISSN 2617-3255 will ultimately -as they wear, use, display, care for and discard the objects -imbue it with personal significance and value.
The meanings and value assigned to portraits of Biko shifted radically over the past four decades, which impacted the ways that designers and consumers engaged with the image and objects bearing its reproductions. To Holmes and his contemporaries, the memorial T-shirt was not produced and worn for expressing personal fashion sense, but to communicate one's affiliation to an ideology and the mass resistance movement. In Stoned Cherrie and Msuseni's uses of the image, fashion and activism are melded, and their products (can be) proudly worn and displayed in public.
I have suggested that, while Stoned Cherrie and Design Team's appropriations of historical Drum covers bring modern, black history into the realm of contemporary popular culture, retro commodification risks obfuscating struggle histories while foregrounding it. However, where images of radical icons of political revolution are translated into and consumed as trendy accessories, the political and ideological connotations of the symbols are seldom wholly subsumed. I argued that this is the case with the image of Biko -whose youth as a reminder of his premature death -is increasingly synonymous with the unfulfilled task of liberation. According to Biko (1987:21), the ability to attain one's envisioned self was central to black emancipation, yet the vast majority of black South Africans still do not enjoy the freedom of self-determination, and struggle to access the resources necessary for attaining their highest potential.
Biko's image no doubt circulates as commodity cipher in cultural industries, but it simultaneously circulates as a symbol of social agitation against neoliberalism, anti-black racism, and capitalist exploitation. Through the public galvanising of Biko's image by those who assert their affiliation to the man and his political ideology in the fashions they wear, display and consume, the radical and subversive power of Biko's image is continually re-activated. 2. The aim of this paper is not to determine why, and which, consumers purchase the products that are discussed. My research is qualitative and, rather than a quantitative research methodology, my approach is foremost that of contextual visual analysis.
3. The existing scholarship on the commodification of Drum magazine covers and Biko's image in retro fashion predominantly focuses on urban youth culture where appropriation of the political icon presents new modes of self-fashioning (see Lewis 2012;Nuttall 2004;Vincent 2007).