Duro Olowu is known chiefly for two things: a style that mixes prints and textures (dubbed “Prints Charming” by Helen Jennings) and his endorsement by former First Lady Michelle Obama, who also had him decorate the Vermeil Room of the White House for Christmas. Since establishing his brand in 2004 following an experience with his former wife and winning New Designer of …

This May Burberry released the final part of its 2018 Pre-Fall ad campaign featuring and art directed by the British-Ghanaian model Adwoa Aboah. The portfolio is set in the model’s homelands: Juergen Teller shot the first installment in London, Aboah’s place of birth, moving then to New York where she is currently based.       This last series follows the …

“Leaving the UK and going ‘home’ to Ghana” is an article by BBC News on reaspora, or reverse migration – the return of first and second generation immigrants to Africa. It comments on two video interviews with a lecturer/deejay and a businessman from Ghana, who have moved back to Accra from London in recent years. This article is useful to summarize a widespread view on reaspora …

Writer Taiye Selasi is credited for having introduced the neologism Afropolitan into pop culture with her famous essay “Bye Bye Babar” (2005), which reformulates cosmopolitanism and citizenship for hypermobile Africans. In the words of Selasi, Afropolitans “belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many”. The ambassadors of a “multi-dimensional thinking”, they “form an identity along at least three dimensions: national, racial, cultural”. This means …

About one year has passed since An African City debuted on YouTube and this web series about five girlfriends in their thirties who relocate to Ghana from the US continues to be one of few audiovisual works aimed at a Western audience that explicitly addresses Afropolitanism. Compared to the host of existing scholarship (Mbembe), online resources, and photographic works focusing on the experiences of cosmopolitan Africans based …

These past few days I have come across two (more) articles documenting the success of African fashion with Western customers, one by a niche publication, and another one by a major news platform. In both cases, ‘African dress’, a rich signifier encompassing a host of different practices and trends, is reduced to a very specific and limited typology of sartorial fashion, aimed predominantly at …

A few days ago, the Dutch textile company Vlisco released its new themed collection of wax-print materials, entitled “THINK”, triggering an outpour of excitement on social media and lifestyle publications. For its first release of the year Vlisco created a motif of lines and geometrical figures whose minimalistic patterns are “inspired by the architectural world of Bauhaus”. The collection’s “clever colouring”, that includes newly-created …