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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …