Not Every Lot Sells: What Bonhams’ African Art Auction Really Reveals
When Bonhams launched the auction for Modern & Contemporary African Art in London, it added yet another chapter to the evolving story of how African and diaspora art is being valued and revalued on the global stage. Now scheduled for 8 October 2025, it will arrive with all the usual signals of a market-watching moment: […]
Trans-continental Collaborations Opened New Markets for African Fashion — Why Did They Pause?
The most transformative moments in African fashion over the past decade have been defined by strategic collaborations that elevated the industry to unprecedented heights. Yet this remarkable ascent was only possible because African designers first established an unshakeable foundation: placing culture at the very heart of their creative vision. What distinguishes African fashion from its […]
Nike x Air Afrique Collaboration fuses Culture, Icons, and Hidden Morse Code
The story starts with a defunct airline and ends with a sneaker that demonstrates what happens when cultural authority drives corporate partnerships. Air Afrique ceased operations in 2002, but its ghost has been haunting the fashion world lately. Not in a melancholy way — more like the kind of haunting that demands attention. When four young […]
Beyond the White Lines. Africa, Fashion, and the U.S. Open
The first tennis clubs in Africa were built like fortresses. Behind their gates in Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Casablanca, colonists played in pressed whites while Africans raked clay, carried balls, or stood outside the fence. The game was there but not for them. That shadow framed a remark by South African designer Wanda Lephoto […]
How African Music Conquered the World (and Why It’s Just Getting Started)
African music has always transcended mere sound. It is memory incarnate, ritual transformed into rhythm, protest given voice, and joy made manifest—a living pulse that carries history from one generation to the next. Over centuries, that pulse has traveled across oceans, first carried by force through slavery, later shared by choice through cultural exchange. […]
Sindiso Khumalo Debuts Flagship Store in Cape Town as a Love Letter to African Craft
There are many facets to Sindiso Khumalo: She is, foremost, a designer whose textiles are instantly recognizable for their bold colors and hand-drawn prints. She is a storyteller who weaves African and Black history into contemporary fashion, creating a compelling bridge between different eras of design. Beyond that, she is an architect by training, an […]
Beauty in Hard Times: Africa’s Lipstick Effect
What do women hold onto when everything else feels uncertain? Across Africa, one answer rises again and again: beauty rituals. In times of economic pressure, when inflation climbs and currencies wobble, many women continue to invest in small but powerful acts of adornment—braids, gele, fragrance oils, or a few yards of fabric. Economists call it […]
WORN OUT — Part III: Return to Sender
How African Designers Are Reclaiming Waste and Rewriting Fashion’s Future The bales arrive as they always have — compressed, labeled, shipped across oceans like cargo without conscience. They still overwhelm ports and markets, a visible symptom of a system that hasn’t stopped. But something has shifted in how they’re received. Across Accra, Cairo, Dakar, workshops […]
WORN OUT — Part II: How African Governments Are Responding to the Textile Waste Crisis
Western wardrobes don’t end in Europe or North America. They spill quietly, devastatingly onto African soil, packed into shipping containers and sold in open-air markets under the guise of “donations.” But from Accra to Kigali, Dakar to Lusaka, something is shifting. The bales keep arriving. The markets keep choking. But across the continent, a patchwork […]
WORN OUT: The True Cost of Your Donated Clothes
Part I — The History of a Heap Kantamanto doesn’t sleep. It breathes, wheezes, and heaves under the weight of foreign fabrics. Bales arrive daily—tightly bound, often soaked in chemical stench or rainwater from cargo ships—marked “donation” in faded marker. They are not gifts. They are transactions. They are waste. And they are profitable for […]