(nyt) THE Na’vi, the blue-skinned clan of the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s screen blockbuster “Avatar,” scale treetops and mountains, and even fly, with a loose-limbed elasticity that Tarzan would have envied. At once exotic and familiar to fans of adventure films, the Pandorans wear latticed animal skins and brightly colored beads, and score their faces with chalky tribal markings. Western fascination with African art and design has blown in gusts for over a century, of course, ever since Picasso and Kandinsky filled their canvases with tribal motifs. As recently as the 1970s, Yves Saint Laurent introduced a collection of “African” dresses constructed from raffia, shells and wooden beads. Now another Afrocentric wind is rising. “Its beauty is in having crossed all sorts of racial barriers,” said Malcolm Harris, the creative director of Unvogue, a popular fashion-focused Webzine. “It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. People are incorporating bits and pieces into their wardrobes and their lives.” That may be because in the popular imagination, African jungles, deserts and plains retain a near-mystical allure, which the reality of the continent’s political turmoil and poverty have never entirely dispelled.

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