A research project on African fashion digitalities
Yatreda is a family-run, Ethiopian collective producing visual art on the NFT market. It was founded in Addis Ababa-by model Kiya Tadele with the goal of preserving, circulating and promoting a future-forward view of Ethiopian heritage. The collective has recently released its largest art series so far, Strong Hair, featuring 100 motion portraits of Ethiopian local hairstyles made using a …
“Designing Identity: Migrant, Refugees and Diaspora Fashion in Italy” is the first article stemming from the research carried out by Caterina Pecchioli and myself for the project “B&W – Black and White, The Migrant Trend”. This project promotes the creation of a network of migrant/refugee fashion designers in Italy and a research endeavour exploring identity making, cultural sustainability, power/authority, and …
Pinda Kida is a Rome-based designer and the founder of the haute couture brand P.Key. Born in France to Malian parents and raised in Rome, Kida designs ethical garments for resilient and empowered women. Claiming multiple origins – Malian, French, and Italian – she views fashion design as a tool to explore the connections between places and cultures and overcome …
I’ve been on a long hiatus, developing a parallel project on sustainability, migration, and decolonisation in collaboration with the Black&White: The Migrant Trend platform. The following is based on a remote interview I did on 12 November, 2021 with Nyambo MasaMara, who is one of the case studies of this new project. Please, do not cite without permission. MasaMara is the …
I’m happy to announce that the “B&W: Black and White – The Migrant Trend” platform is online. Visit the page at this link. B&W is the social promotion association co-founded and art directed by Caterina Pecchioli, supporting migrant fashion makers in Italy. Its goal is to consolidate the Italian fashion realities – social cooperatives, companies and fashion projects – launched, or involving asylum seekers, refugees, …
Among its many legacies, colonialism bred a unique fashion culture across the African continent, one that owes its dynamism and innovation to its inner complexities. Designer Wanda LePhoto has been exploring the cultural syncretism of contemporary sartorial expressions in his native South Africa for a long time. “Black Renaissance” is the latest collection of LePhoto’s eponymous brand, peeling back the …
As both scholar and designer, Christine Checinska has worked in fashion for decades. Through the years, she has developed a substantial body of work on the relationship between race, culture, and cloth, focusing on British and British-diasporan contexts. She is currently Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where she is curating Africa Fashion, …
On 8 May, I presented the ongoing research on African designers in Italy that I am conducting with Caterina Pecchioli of “B&W: Black and White – The Migrant Trend”. The presentation, that we entitled “Designing Identity: A Visual Proposition to examine migrant and second-generation fashion in Italy” can be viewed at this link, starting at 4:26:22.
The African Lookbook is the new Bloomsbury publication gathering 130 photographs of stylish women taken between 1870 and 1970. The photographs belong to Catherine McKinley’s large collection of vernacular and studio shots from over 40 African countries and spanning the early colonial decades through the present. I had the pleasure to interview Catherine on the book, which is the first …
Upon clicking “Enter,” Before We Disappear opens to a low-angle shot of a house surrounded by dense vegetation, seemingly immune to the vivid jabber and birdsong on the sound track. The camera pans over the encroaching shrubbery and the carvings on the outer walls instead, barely registering the human figure in a cream-coloured headscarf behind a screen of leaves and …
