SMITHSONIAN

Golden Yellow Burgundy Wax Print Cotton Dashiki

1970s · 1970s · African American

Production

ready-to-wear

Material

cotton wax print

Culture

African American

Movement

Black Pride Movement · Hippie / Counterculture

Influences

West African wax print tradition · 1970s Afrocentric fashion movement

A long-sleeved shirt constructed from African wax print cotton featuring a bold checkerboard pattern. Each square alternates between golden yellow and deep burgundy red backgrounds, with stylized mask or face motifs printed in contrasting colors within each square. The shirt has a standard collar, button-front closure, and straight-cut sleeves with button cuffs. The geometric repetition of the mask pattern creates a striking visual rhythm across the fabric surface. The wax print technique produces the characteristic waxy hand and vibrant, saturated colors typical of West African textiles that became popular in African American fashion during the 1970s cultural pride movement.

shirt/blouseregular fitcollarlesship length

Connected To

Golden Yellow Burgundy Wax Print Cotton Dashiki

83%

Black Wax Print Bucket Hat with Figurative Motifs

Influences·1970s Afrocentric fashion movementInfluences·West African wax print traditionMovement

Echoes Across Time

Cream Cotton Net Flapper Dress with Coral Florals

Roaring Twenties / Art Deco → 1970s · 50yr46%

SHARED

Technique·block-printingTechnique·machine-weaving

Deep Burgundy Silk Velvet Fragment with Dragon Motifs

Baroque → 1970s · 270yr44%

SHARED

Pull the Thread→

Follow this garment wherever the graph leads

Both pieces pulse with the same cultural awakening—that moment in the '70s when African American fashion turned toward ancestral aesthetics as political statement. The dashiki's geometric checkerboard of burgundy and gold, punctuated by symbolic motifs, shares DNA with the bucket hat's bold figural patterns rendered in the same high-contrast palette that makes wax-print fabric so visually arresting.

Gold Black Abstract Print High Crown Hat

Gold Black Abstract Print High Crown Hat

56%

Golden Yellow Burgundy Wax Print Cotton Dashiki

Movement·Hippie / Counterculture

LINEAGEsame era · cross-category→ directed

Lineage: “1970s Afrocentric fashion movement”

These two pieces capture the same cultural moment from different angles—the 1970s Afrocentric fashion movement that saw African Americans reclaim visual identity through dress. The hat's sinuous, scale-like pattern and the dashiki's geometric wax-print grid both draw from traditional African textile vocabularies, but where the dashiki makes an obvious political statement with its pan-African silhouette, the hat smuggles that same resistance into everyday Western headwear.

Text67%

Image75%

Entity25%