The Africa Azzedine Alaïa Carried
Azzedine Alaïa left Tunis as a young man and built his life in Paris, but the leaving was never really finished. “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa,” Olivier Saillard’s exhibition at the couturier’s foundation in the Marais, takes that unfinished departure as its subject. There are around fifty pieces, most of them from the collections Alaïa made […]
Bairro 6 de Maio
On a cold morning on the outskirts of Amadora, northwest of Lisbon, the ground gives way to rubble. Women roast corn on improvised grills, and residents sit in their doorways with morna playing low, the slow Cape Verdean music the islands call the sound of the soul. A handful of houses still stand among the […]
Meriem Berrada Took Morocco to Venice for the First Time
For about a decade and a half, Meriem Berrada has been at the forefront of building sustainable art and cultural ecosystems across Africa and the Arab world and their diasporas, with a focus on the intersections between art and craft in contemporary storytelling, as well as an interest in photography. She has founded, launched, and […]
Love Has Become Bad Manners
Hasna and Ryan kept giving themselves away, a shoulder leaning in, a collar fixed with a care no collar has ever needed, their bodies doing what bodies do before pride gets involved. Nobody in the room minded that the two of them wanted each other; the discomfort was that the wanting kept showing on their […]
Marriage Was Always the Plan for These African Men. Until It Wasn’t
The average African man is often assumed to want marriage, or at least that is the expectation many grow up with. For centuries, marriage has been positioned as one of adulthood’s defining milestones, a marker of success and fulfillment against which many men are quietly measured. In many communities, that expectation begins early. Almost as […]
The Cloth That Carries the Church
In Zambia’s Catholic congregations, the chitenge carries an authority the church never put in writing.
If This. Then That: World Cup Edition — Dressing the Team — Loewe → Ibrahim Fernandez
If you understand why Loewe’s suit for Spain matters, you’ll recognize what Ibrahim Fernandez did for Côte d’Ivoire. IF YOU LIKE LOEWE Loewe is the LVMH-owned Spanish house, and it signed a four-year deal to dress Spain’s national teams off the pitch. The wardrobe, designed under creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, runs to […]
Kente and the Politics of Being Read
On June 8, 2020, a group of Democratic lawmakers knelt on the floor of the United States Capitol for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the duration then believed to mark how long a Minneapolis officer had knelt on George Floyd’s neck, later revised at trial to nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Several of them wore […]
Huguette Tchiapi’s Debut Begins in Yaoundé
Huguette Tchiapi is continuing an existing convergence, building a fashion brand that brings together the intricacies of her Cameroonian roots and the influence of her British identity. Like most emerging designers, she is deliberate about where her ideas come from. She speaks about influence less as something simply absorbed and more as something that can […]
Nigerian Women Are Dressing Against the Code
Two decades ago, Y2K marked one of the most expressive moments in Nigerian fashion, shaped by the rise of internet culture and the influence of Nollywood. Visibility, then, felt intentional and confident rather than excessive. A version of that sensibility has returned, carried by a generation that dresses for how it wants to feel rather […]