YSL SuperAfro
Fake to original - Reapropriation - Screen-print of SuperAfro tag on a fake Yves Saint Laurent textile collected in a street market in Salvador.
Brazil, 2013
In collaboration with SuperAfro (Brazilian Grafitti Artist)
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As a pattern collector, I found the fake Yves Saint Laurent textile in a street market in Salvador, Bahia. I re-stamped with the tag of the Bahian graffiti artist SuperAfro on the fake fabric of the French designer to turn a fake product, original. Reversing the market logic of big fashion brands/institutions constantly appropriate from street culture and cultural movements to create trends that already exist, but are validated when appropriated. This movement of cultural and commercial appropriation of languages and narratives, usually from marginalized groups, constantly relate original and fake products to the bodies that carry them. Race and class always interfere in how we perceive what the other wears, creating a value judgment about what is original and what is fake. The Yves Saint Laurent museum in Morocco, North Africa, also shows how much of the designer's work was appropriated from styles and techniques of ancestral African people.

Fabio Mota AKA SuperAfro is a Bahian artist from Salvador, that has a long history in street art and graffiti, who created an super hero because we are constantly in war, and to survive to it. We met in 2012 and I invited him to create a limited series of scarves using screen-printing over printed textiles that I collected.
Images below are from SuperAfro Flickr page.

