DASHIKI - 1970

Along with the black leather jackets and natural hairstyles, the dashiki was another staple of Black resistance movements in the 1960s and 1970s. Originating in West Africa, the word “dashiki” comes from the Yoruba word danshiki that refers to work tunics worn by men in that region. In the late 1960s, dashikis began to be reproduced en masse in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriated by Black revolutionaries in an effort to cast off white, Western norms of dress and decorum and to embrace their ancestral African heritage, the dashiki quickly became a powerful icon of the Black is Beautiful movement and persists to this day as a colorful sartorial symbol that declares its wearer proudly Black.