5 - “It looks just like your hair”: faking an authentic look through Made-in-China wigs for Africa

Hair, being the only fully commodified human tissue, is the base of a multi-billion dollar wig industry in African fashion scene. Wig is an essential fashion items for black female consumers all over the world. Their taste and preferences are crucial to manufacturers and designers of wigs. Despite the development of fabric machinery, wigs, especially human-hair wigs, are still made by hand. Being a large supplier of human hair, a source of cheap labour, and an important manufacturing hub, China has been the major manufacturer of both synthetic and human-hair wig since 2000s. How do Chinese designers perceive and adopt black fashion aesthetic? What is the difference of wig aesthetic between black markets under different economic levels, cultural backgrounds, and weathers? Is Chinese cultural background involved during the designing process by Chinese designers, and how? How do wig industry in China learn to communicate with African femininity and philosophy of body through objects?
Based on interviews with wig manufacturers, designers, Chinese and African traders, and participant observation in Guangzhou and Xuchang (China), this research aims to display the internal perspective on Chinese racial economy, interrogating the Chinese understanding of real/fake spectrum, and challenge the unidirectional power relation in the global fashion value chain.