I just went back and read Zaeobi’s thoughtful post. I very much agree about the appropriation of culture, and have posted before about various designers/retailers making exact copies of designs or styles and selling them for big $$$$.
A related issue I see is in “tolerant” European and N American areas where styles and ways of living from other places and whatever other ways of living that diverge from the normalized style of the day are all put on an equal footing. One specific instance of this I recall hearing from a friend who had a PhD in biochemistry, worked out hard every day, was extremely careful in his money management and overall a very careful guy was about women who were attracted to him. They “didn’t mind” that, being from Guinnea Conekry, he did things differently than they had been raised. They did things differently too. And then he’d see their homes—dirty and unkempt. He spoke about this more directly than my other friends, but I remember quite a few African guys I knew agreeing with the general vibe that their culture and traditions were being put on par with carelessness and dirt—if everything is OK, then their cultures weren’t any more valuable than dirt. There is more to fetishization of Black men than that, of course, but it was chilling to me to see this connection for the first time.
But I’m far off the topic of fashion. “Boho” style can be traced back at least to the 1920s when it had many of these same issues—absynth and opium were frequently used by the “boho” rebellious women who fancied peasant and South Asian styles. Its revival in the 1960s was tied again to “peace, love, and understanding” which could be understood in a strong way, as societal ideals which are difficult to achieve, but are more often interpreted as that shrug that says nothing is better than anything else. The style still has that connotation.
In my mind, there is a cavernous difference between wearing things that drape nicely, are voluminous (but not too much) are made of natural fibers in ways that show the weave or slubs, with tassels, embroidery, and other embellishments, on one hand, and wearing specific items from another culture, on the other.
My Somali sisters-in-law (he and I nevr legally married, but they didn’t know that) were delighted to get me dresses like theirs, and I admired their way of putting together patterns I never would have matched. I wore the dresses they gave me when I was in Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Dar es Salaam, and I wore hijab when it was called for (including once to a Somali funeral in Europe). I might wear a head scarf as a scarf now, but not in a way that pretends to a belief I don’t have. I might wear some of the dresses around the house. Not because I think they are inferior, but because wearing them outside would, in my mind, be making a claim to be something I’m not. I see it as similar to my son learning African-American Vernacular. He is seen and treated as a Black person, so that language is his. No matter how much I love him and how close I become to him or any other Black individual, I will never have that experience, and so I don’t use that language. I’m not only talking about the N-word, but other words, phrases, pronounciations, and sentence structures as well.
There are at least three distinct meanings to “Bohemian”: relating to a region between Germany and Checkia where we think my great-grandmother’s family lived; anything connected to peasant or non-Western cultures; a collection of stylistic features such as natural materials, fits that are not binding, and ornamentation, whether in clothing or interior design. I don’t know how we separate one from the others. Words morph and take on new meanings, often without shedding their previous meaning (using a mouse to browse through your desktop to remove spam, anyone?). Although I argue many times for changing language usage that is problematic, I don’t think that is the point here. In my mind, not fetishizing or stealing—literally stealing the intellectual property—cultural creations is the point here.
Is there an easy way to signify what we do and do not mean when we use this word?
