Africa Grows the Cotton. A Dakar Gathering Asks Who Profits.

Attendees and exhibitors at Africa Sourcing & Fashion Week (ASFW) Dakar 2026, the continental trade fair on textile sourcing and fashion industrialisation

The most important fashion event in Dakar this year had less to do with fashion than with industry. For three days in March, the Centre des Expositions de Diamniadio drew manufacturers, policymakers, textile producers, leather experts, investors, designers, entrepreneurs and development partners from across Africa and beyond, gathered for the inaugural Africa Sourcing & Fashion […]

Data Oruwari Channels Ancestral Wisdom Through Art and Sound

Data Oruwari Channels Ancestral Wisdom Through Art and Sound 1 2

In a world seduced by speed, surface, and spectacle, Data Oruwari moves like an ancestral drumbeat — steady, sacred, and impossible to ignore. Known as The Ancestors’ Scribe, she is not merely a visual artist, but a sound alchemist, a spiritual technologist, and a living archive of African ancestral cosmology. Through glyphs etched in ink […]

Threads of Influence: A Series on Black Tailoring

Threads of Influence: A Series on Black Tailoring Kuba Bantu King Attire DRC e1757701247312

A seven-part Guzangs series on Black tailoring, written into and around the 2025 Met Gala’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” The Costume Institute’s 2025 theme made Black dandyism the subject of the year’s most-watched fashion event. Threads of Influence spent four weeks reporting around it, beginning with pre-colonial African menswear and ending on the Met steps. […]

Otanjele: A Study of Choice, Spirit, and Feminine Power

Otanjele: A Study of Choice, Spirit, and Feminine Power ohlanna

Màká ná ónyé kwéé, chi ya esòlú ya kweta (When one agrees, his personal/guiding spirit, is in agreement with him) This Igbo idiom sits at the heart of Otanjele, an eight-look artistic assemblage shaped by ideas of agency, destiny, and feminine self-possession. It’s a body of work that draws from spiritual philosophy, cultural symbolism, and […]