African Skinheads in the Lagos Calling Project

Lagos Calling is one of the most powerful projects of Clayton Cubitt, in which the famous American fashion photographer demonstrates the fashion of African skinheads of the early 70s.

Looking at such photos, the layman often frowns, they say, how can African skins exist? Such a reaction is natural. It is the result of many years of public ignorance, blindness to historical facts; propaganda, as a result of which the single-vector media demonized the concept of "skinhead", composing its meaning from a handful of disparate stereotypes. For the modern man in the street there is no difference between tradesmen, boneheads, football hooligans and Nazis. For him, all this is called "skins" and means "bald racists in shoes who love to scalp students of the Peoples' Friendship University and smear the statue of Adolf Hitler with Jewish blood on holidays."

That is why, when the phrase "traditional skinhead" pops up, it inevitably has to be explained that traditional skinheads were not racists, since their subculture was a hybrid of two cultures — black Jamaican rood boys and English hard mods. It is enough to listen to your favorite trad music (ska, reggae, rocksteady, soul) so that the racial issue disappears once and for all.

On Cubitt's cards we see variations of the "boots & braces" style ("boots and suspenders") with a characteristic "black" color.