Nigerian stylist and photographer Daniel Obasi has recently collaborated with Vogue on an international project capturing Creativity in motion in various international locations. He shot the editorial on the railway tracks at Ebute-Metta, in his home city of Lagos, for Vogue’s March 2021 issue. Obasi is known for his arresting representations of moving bodies, which happen to be wrapped in beautiful outfits. The clothes highlight …

I wrote a second guest post for Griot Magazine on Kristin-Lee Moolman’s “Banyoloyi a Bosigo”, the new fashion film she wrote and directed for Thebe Magugu that was presented virtually at Paris Fashion Week early this month. The collection showcased in this work explores the revival of indigenous spirituality in South Africa and features several references to sacred rituals. Like …

Last year, designers Stella Jean (of the eponymous brand) and Edward Buchanan (Sansovino 6) with Michelle Ngonmo, talent scout and founder of Afro Fashion Week Milano, started the collective “Black Lives Matter in Italian Fashion” to raise awareness on systemic racism in the industry. Their first intervention took place on the final day of Milano Fashion Week, in September 2020, …

Obroni Wawu is the Akan expression for used clothes in Ghana. It translates to “the white man has died clothes”: a reference to Western material abundance. “Dead White Man’s Clothes” is also the name of the multimedia research project on the secondhand clothing trade that Americans Liz Ricketts and Branson Skinner begun in 2016 to investigate the impact of fast …

Griot is the reference platform for Black Italians, producing content for and on the black diaspora in Italy and abroad, including documentaries and live events. I contributed an article to their “Style” section on MasaMara, the activewear brand launched in 2016 by Amza Nyonzima, a.k.a. Eli Gold, a Rwandan refugee based in South Africa. In the fashion film introducing Migration is Beautiful – …

Victor Reginald Bob Abbey-Hart is a designer and sculptor from Ghana’s coastal town of Saltpond. He officially launched Gavachy, a ready-to-wear brand of luxury “Neo-African” styles, in 2015 and has since showed several times in Ghana, Nigeria, and Togo, before relocating to Europe. Ghanaian aesthetic, particularly traditional textile designs and architecture, inspire his work. For “Occularcentrism”, his SS2018 collection, Victor …

Twyg is a not-for-profit media company founded by Jackie May, a writer and former editor at Marie Claire and The Times and now a full-time sustainability advocate. Twyg officially launched in February 2019 to promote an eco-conscious fashion and lifestyle in South Africa. The company, a member of the Union for Concerned Fashion Researchers, is aligned with the U.N. Sustainable …

The Slum Studio – IG @theslumstudio – is a Ghanaian brand that creates wearable art pieces with clothing waste sourced in Accra. Its model of sustainability applies circularity, regeneration, and ethical standards to art-making and is informed by a reflection on human geographies and the socially-produced nature of space. The garments are material maps of multiple journeys and the realities …

Kate Fletcher and Mathilda Tham’s Earth Logic (2019), available at this link, is a compelling free-to-read, free-to-share, intervention on sustainable fashion and the industry’s shortcomings. In fact, it is a critique of widespread approaches to the crisis that fashion, as one of the world’s largest industrial sectors, has not only contributed to precipitate, but is also accelerating. Fletcher and Tham …

Anthony Bila is an acclaimed South African photographer/director, whom I have followed since I began my research and virtually met last year while working on the documentary “African Catwalk” for Italy’s broadcaster, RAI. Bila is one of the first artists that I blogged about and is featured in the documentary, where he describes his practice as capturing the changes happening …