Photographs by Stéphan Gladieu, whose “Egungun” series was shot in Benin and exhibited at Galerie Olivier Castaing, Paris.
2025 was the year African culture stopped explaining itself. The shift was visible across music, fashion, film, and craft—work that assumed its audience rather than courting one, that operated on its own terms rather than translating for external consumption.
On Guzangs, this translated into coverage that treated culture as method, not material. The question was never “what does African creativity look like?” but “how does it work, and what does it know?” The answer, across a year of reporting, was consistent: it works through inheritance, through material, through practice. And it knows more than it’s been credited with.
The Year’s Defining Argument
Gelisa George. Courtesy of Upcycler Dakar, photography by Abi Conway.
The WORN OUT series became this year’s clearest articulation of African creative logic. Across Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, and Egypt, designers took discarded textiles from the West—dead stock, second-hand clothing, industrial waste—and made them speak. This wasn’t upcycling as trend or sustainability as branding exercise. It was something harder to name: an insistence that material carries memory, and that transformation is a form of authorship.
Gelisa George of Upcycler Dakar works with fabric that has already lived one life in Europe or America. By the time it reaches her studio, it carries wear patterns, fading, small repairs—evidence of previous ownership. Her garments don’t erase this history; they build on it. The same principle animated BOYEDOE in Ghana, Reform Studio in Egypt, Maisha by Nisria in Kenya. Waste became inventory. Damage became texture. What arrived as castoff left as couture.
The economic argument is obvious. The cultural argument is more important. These designers demonstrated that value is not inherent in material but assigned through practice. A bolt of deadstock cotton has no intrinsic worth until someone decides what it means.
What the Coverage Revealed
Amar Ghaly enters the sea wearing the Washak pendant, a Tuareg talisman passed through generations. Shot in Hammamet by Dior Sow.
Looking back across the year’s work, certain patterns emerge that weren’t visible when the pieces were published individually.
First: African culture in 2025 was intensely material. In A Letter From Tounes, Sahelian textiles carried genealogical information—who made them, who wore them, what occasions they marked. Hair Culture in West Africa showed how braiding patterns encode social position, spiritual affiliation, regional origin. The Dakar Sound Project demonstrated that rhythm functions as archive, preserving knowledge that doesn’t survive translation to text. Across these features, culture lived in objects, bodies, and practices rather than in ideas that could be extracted and exported.
Second: the work was collective before it was individual. The Power of the Collective profiled the artisans behind runway collections—kente weavers, indigo dyers, beadworkers—and found that their knowledge is distributed rather than owned. A master weaver in Bonwire doesn’t hold proprietary techniques; he holds a position in a network of transmission that stretches back generations and forward into apprenticeships. The designer who commissions his work is buying access to that network, not just the product of his hands.
Third: diaspora and continent operated in genuine dialogue. Harlem’s Murid community, covered during Bamba Day, practices a Senegalese Sufi tradition adapted to New York conditions—same devotional framework, different built environment, different economic pressures, different relationship to public space. The relationship isn’t extraction or dilution; it’s continuation under different constraints.
Ritual Enters the Frame
African Ritual Aesthetics in the Age of Luxury Fashion, Bernard Dayo’s essay for Guzangs, generated more debate than any other piece this year. The argument was provocative: sacred objects—masks, ceremonial textiles, cowrie-laden headpieces—are now appearing in fashion and art contexts, but they haven’t been neutralized by that migration. They still operate. They still make demands on their viewers.
The Egungun coverage made this concrete. When masquerade enters public space in Yoruba communities, it doesn’t represent ancestors; tradition holds that it is the ancestor, temporarily present. The textile and beadwork that constitute the costume aren’t decorative; they’re infrastructural, enabling a specific kind of presence. Fashion commentary that treats such garments as aesthetic objects misses the point entirely.
This created productive friction with coverage of commercial fashion. If sacred textiles retain their charge in gallery contexts, what happens when designers reference them in seasonal collections? The year’s coverage didn’t resolve this tension—couldn’t resolve it—but it made the stakes clear.
Street as Method
Free The Youth in Accra, Daily Paper across multiple markets, Ashluxe in Lagos, Severe Nature, MIZIZI—the year’s streetwear coverage tracked a generation of brands that refuse the distinction between fashion and politics. Their garments carry text, reference history, cite movements. A hoodie isn’t just a hoodie; it’s a position statement.
What made this coverage different from the standard “African streetwear is having a moment” narrative was attention to distribution. These brands aren’t waiting for European stockists to validate them. They’re building direct relationships with customers, using social media as primary retail channel, treating Lagos and Accra and Nairobi as sufficient markets rather than stepping stones to Paris or London. The ambition isn’t recognition; it’s infrastructure.
The Image as Evidence
Courtesy of the Italian Cultural Institute. Photography By Badara Preira.
Daniele Tamagni’s work, profiled in Style Is Life, offered a different theory of fashion photography. His subjects—sapeurs, festival-goers, everyday people in considered dress—aren’t styled for camera. They’re documented mid-gesture, mid-afternoon, mid-life. The result is fashion photography that functions as ethnography: evidence of how people actually dress when they’re dressing for themselves.
This approach influenced Guzangs’ visual coverage throughout the year. The goal wasn’t aspiration—making readers want what they see—but recognition: making visible the sophistication that already exists in African sartorial practice, whether or not it appears on any official calendar.
What 2025 Made Clear
African culture did not arrive this year. It did not break through, emerge, or get discovered. It continued—generating knowledge, circulating material, sustaining communities, producing beauty on its own schedule.
What changed was the frame. Coverage that once asked “can African creativity compete globally?” gave way to coverage that asked “what does African creativity already know that global markets haven’t learned?” The answer, increasingly, involves sustainability, community, transmission, and time—concerns that Western fashion is only now, under pressure, beginning to take seriously.
The WORN OUT designers understand material cycles. The artisan collectives understand distributed knowledge. The streetwear founders understand direct-to-community economics. The ritual practitioners understand that some things don’t translate and shouldn’t have to.
2025’s cultural production didn’t wait for permission or applause. It operated. It continues to operate. That’s not a moment—it’s a method.
Best of Culture 2025
2025 was the year African culture stopped explaining itself. The shift was visible across music, fashion, film, and craft—work that assumed its audience rather than courting one, that operated on its own terms rather than translating for external consumption.
On Guzangs, this translated into coverage that treated culture as method, not material. The question was never “what does African creativity look like?” but “how does it work, and what does it know?” The answer, across a year of reporting, was consistent: it works through inheritance, through material, through practice. And it knows more than it’s been credited with.
The Year’s Defining Argument
The WORN OUT series became this year’s clearest articulation of African creative logic. Across Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, and Egypt, designers took discarded textiles from the West—dead stock, second-hand clothing, industrial waste—and made them speak. This wasn’t upcycling as trend or sustainability as branding exercise. It was something harder to name: an insistence that material carries memory, and that transformation is a form of authorship.
Gelisa George of Upcycler Dakar works with fabric that has already lived one life in Europe or America. By the time it reaches her studio, it carries wear patterns, fading, small repairs—evidence of previous ownership. Her garments don’t erase this history; they build on it. The same principle animated BOYEDOE in Ghana, Reform Studio in Egypt, Maisha by Nisria in Kenya. Waste became inventory. Damage became texture. What arrived as castoff left as couture.
The economic argument is obvious. The cultural argument is more important. These designers demonstrated that value is not inherent in material but assigned through practice. A bolt of deadstock cotton has no intrinsic worth until someone decides what it means.
What the Coverage Revealed
Looking back across the year’s work, certain patterns emerge that weren’t visible when the pieces were published individually.
First: African culture in 2025 was intensely material. In A Letter From Tounes, Sahelian textiles carried genealogical information—who made them, who wore them, what occasions they marked. Hair Culture in West Africa showed how braiding patterns encode social position, spiritual affiliation, regional origin. The Dakar Sound Project demonstrated that rhythm functions as archive, preserving knowledge that doesn’t survive translation to text. Across these features, culture lived in objects, bodies, and practices rather than in ideas that could be extracted and exported.
Second: the work was collective before it was individual. The Power of the Collective profiled the artisans behind runway collections—kente weavers, indigo dyers, beadworkers—and found that their knowledge is distributed rather than owned. A master weaver in Bonwire doesn’t hold proprietary techniques; he holds a position in a network of transmission that stretches back generations and forward into apprenticeships. The designer who commissions his work is buying access to that network, not just the product of his hands.
Third: diaspora and continent operated in genuine dialogue. Harlem’s Murid community, covered during Bamba Day, practices a Senegalese Sufi tradition adapted to New York conditions—same devotional framework, different built environment, different economic pressures, different relationship to public space. The relationship isn’t extraction or dilution; it’s continuation under different constraints.
Ritual Enters the Frame
African Ritual Aesthetics in the Age of Luxury Fashion, Bernard Dayo’s essay for Guzangs, generated more debate than any other piece this year. The argument was provocative: sacred objects—masks, ceremonial textiles, cowrie-laden headpieces—are now appearing in fashion and art contexts, but they haven’t been neutralized by that migration. They still operate. They still make demands on their viewers.
The Egungun coverage made this concrete. When masquerade enters public space in Yoruba communities, it doesn’t represent ancestors; tradition holds that it is the ancestor, temporarily present. The textile and beadwork that constitute the costume aren’t decorative; they’re infrastructural, enabling a specific kind of presence. Fashion commentary that treats such garments as aesthetic objects misses the point entirely.
This created productive friction with coverage of commercial fashion. If sacred textiles retain their charge in gallery contexts, what happens when designers reference them in seasonal collections? The year’s coverage didn’t resolve this tension—couldn’t resolve it—but it made the stakes clear.
Street as Method
Free The Youth in Accra, Daily Paper across multiple markets, Ashluxe in Lagos, Severe Nature, MIZIZI—the year’s streetwear coverage tracked a generation of brands that refuse the distinction between fashion and politics. Their garments carry text, reference history, cite movements. A hoodie isn’t just a hoodie; it’s a position statement.
What made this coverage different from the standard “African streetwear is having a moment” narrative was attention to distribution. These brands aren’t waiting for European stockists to validate them. They’re building direct relationships with customers, using social media as primary retail channel, treating Lagos and Accra and Nairobi as sufficient markets rather than stepping stones to Paris or London. The ambition isn’t recognition; it’s infrastructure.
The Image as Evidence
Daniele Tamagni’s work, profiled in Style Is Life, offered a different theory of fashion photography. His subjects—sapeurs, festival-goers, everyday people in considered dress—aren’t styled for camera. They’re documented mid-gesture, mid-afternoon, mid-life. The result is fashion photography that functions as ethnography: evidence of how people actually dress when they’re dressing for themselves.
This approach influenced Guzangs’ visual coverage throughout the year. The goal wasn’t aspiration—making readers want what they see—but recognition: making visible the sophistication that already exists in African sartorial practice, whether or not it appears on any official calendar.
What 2025 Made Clear
African culture did not arrive this year. It did not break through, emerge, or get discovered. It continued—generating knowledge, circulating material, sustaining communities, producing beauty on its own schedule.
What changed was the frame. Coverage that once asked “can African creativity compete globally?” gave way to coverage that asked “what does African creativity already know that global markets haven’t learned?” The answer, increasingly, involves sustainability, community, transmission, and time—concerns that Western fashion is only now, under pressure, beginning to take seriously.
The WORN OUT designers understand material cycles. The artisan collectives understand distributed knowledge. The streetwear founders understand direct-to-community economics. The ritual practitioners understand that some things don’t translate and shouldn’t have to.
2025’s cultural production didn’t wait for permission or applause. It operated. It continues to operate. That’s not a moment—it’s a method.
Share This:
You Might Also Like
The Tunnel Is Louder Than the Stadium
Richmond Ekow Barnes
The Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony, Reimagined Through a Photographer’s Lens
Oury Sene
The Tailor, the Bassist, and the Look That Defined Zambian Rock
Ugonna-Ora Owoh
Best of Music 2025
Richmond Ekow Barnes
Best of Art 2025
Ugonna-Ora Owoh
The Art of Being Seen: Fashion as Resistance Across Four African Subcultures
Ugonna-Ora Owoh