ABSTRACT
In a recent article, activist Angela Davis complained that the Afro is remembered today only as a nostalgic hairdo, a development that, she argues, “reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.” Davis cited, for example, a 1994 fashion spread from the magazine Vibe, which featured an actress dressed as a revolutionary Angela Davis circa 1969. Davis decried the use of her image as a “commodified backdrop for advertising” without reference to the historical and political context that gave the image its meaning and power in the 1960s. In fact, the recent revival of the Afro as “retro-chic” is only the latest development in a commodification process that began only a few years after the style first emerged as a symbol of black pride and a rejection of white beauty standards. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the height of the Black Power movement, the Afro was as fashionable as it was political.
