Like other South African sub-regional countries, the Angolans have adapted the Western style of fashion, most especially their urban centers. Angolans are generally seen wearing jeans and T-shirts.
Nevertheless, Angola has its traditional dress that braces up the pride, symbol, and culture of the country. Purely influenced with the cultural influences of typical Africa, the traditional dress of Angola is also having varying designs and patterns made with various textiles. This however can sometimes be worn at traditional weddings, mostly at the rural parts of the country. This traditional dress in Angola is made with neatly hand-woven cotton clothes, and which always resonates Angolans’ pride and culture when donned in it.
Aside the sense of fashion in clothing, Angolan women do also pay keen attention to their makeup and jewelry on that graceful traditional day of theirs.
Their jewelry is important as they love to wear bracelets, necklaces and other bead ornaments for their adornment.
Basically today, Angolan have had a major tilt towards the imported culture and tradition, which are chiefly influencing their traditional weddings, and sadly, waning their culture. Although there is a prevalence of western-cultural influence, but there are still traditional norms kept intact, even as traditional wedding styles are concerned.
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However, some Angolan couples do resort to wearing batik fabric material for their great day. Batik fabric is made from a technique of wax-resist dyeing applied to the whole cloth, or cloth made using this technique. Batik can be either made either by drawing dots and lines of the resist with a spouted tool called a canting, or by printing the resist with a copper stamp called a cap. The applied wax resists dyes and therefore allows the artisan to color selectively by soaking the cloth in just one color, removing the wax with boiling water, and repeating it to/with desirable colors.
The tradition of making batik is found in various countries, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, but the batik of Indonesia is the best-known and unarguably most expensive.
Batik, being an adorable ancient piece of art and craft, its process is very similar to how African print fabric is made, except for the fact that instead of using industrial printing machinery, it is all done by hand. These fabrics are hence used to make traditional African dress that is common in Angolan traditional weddings, as well as modern Afrocentric styles of dress.
Another popular dress being rocked at Angolan traditional weddings is the samakaka. This is a bold and beautiful dress from Angola.It is made in a variety of color blends albeit, but the most common samakaka prints are black, red and white, representative of the color symbol of Angola.
The black represents the African continent, the red represents the bloodshed from Angola’s liberation struggle, and the yellow represents the wealth of the country. The geometric shapes on the fabric are rooted in traditional symbols.
To many people in the country, samakaka is the fabric of cultural value of Angola, with its stunning wear at big functions like traditional wedding.
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