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Across Lagos, Dakar, and London, African designers are increasingly turning to the sacred. From Adama Paris’ waridjé mask bags to Bubu Ogisi’s bronze accessories cast in Benin City, from Labrum London’s Nomoli figures to Lafalaise Dion’s monumental cowrie headpieces, the language of the divine now circulates in global luxury markets.
What once lived in shrines and masquerade groves now glimmers beneath runway lights. Objects once charged with spiritual energy—beads, veils, cowries, and masks—are refashioned as emblems of identity and style.
This aesthetic turn signals more than nostalgia or cultural pride. It reveals the fraught negotiation between indigeneity and modernity, sacred function and capitalist form, ritual purpose and market circulation.
African fashion, in this moment, is not only about adornment. It is about the transition of cosmology into commodity, the re-encoding of ancestral symbols into the visual vocabulary of global luxury. But translation always distorts, with new meanings emerging.
A materialist lens exposes what glossy fashion coverage often conceals: that every ethnic motif entering the global market carries with it a history of dispossession, extraction, and symbolic violence.
When colonial powers looted African ritual objects—masks, bronzes, textiles—they transformed them from spiritual technologies into museum artifacts. The violence was both physical and epistemological: objects were stolen, and their meanings were erased.
The modern fashion system operates within economies shaped by these colonial legacies, though contemporary African designers assert fundamentally different relationships to their cultural heritage. Where colonizers appropriated without consent or compensation, today’s designers reclaim ancestral symbols with creative sovereignty. Yet the marketplace itself remains shaped by colonial structures. Objects once meant to mediate between the human and the ancestral are still recoded as aesthetic surfaces, divorced from their ritual meaning but rich in market value.
The African luxury designer thus stands in a paradoxical position. They are reclaiming what was stolen, yet also selling what was once sacred. They are creating modern fashion through spiritual archives, navigating between reverence and commerce.
This contradiction does not nullify the work—it gives it its power and its danger.
Among contemporary designers, Bubu Ogisi perhaps engages this tension most critically. Her label, IAMISIGO, treats fabric as both archive and altar. Ogisi’s garments are not mere clothes; they are portals that re-enchant the body. She works with materials like handwoven raffia, bronze, and bark cloth, drawing from spiritual textures across the continent.
The bronze accessories in her collections—bracelets and collars produced in Benin City—embody this lineage most vividly. Benin City remains the historic home of royal bronze casting, where from the 15th century onward, the hereditary Igun Eronmwon guild created effigies exclusively for the Oba’s court. In their original cosmology, such effigies were not mere art objects but ancestral presences, cast to preserve divine authority and spiritual continuity within the royal court.
Yet once these bronze accessories circulate through luxury fashion’s global economy, they enter a new order of meaning. What was once a ritual conduit becomes commodity, transposed from shrine to showroom. Its aura is retained, but its agency displaced.
Ogisi seems acutely aware of this contradiction. Her presentations often reassert the body as sacred technology, resisting the flattening gaze of commerce by staging fashion as invocation rather than display. Still, the luxury apparatus thrives on such inversions—it feeds on aura, transmuting devotion into desire, turning the spiritual into the spectacular.
So the question lingers, unresolved: can ritual survive the market without becoming its ornament?
The Senegalese designer offers another potent case. Her Waridje mask bag reimagines what appears to be a ceremonial mask form as a sleek accessory for cosmopolitan women.
On one hand, this is a triumph of African self-representation. The Waridje is no longer a museum artifact or anthropological curiosity; it becomes a living, wearable symbol of African futurity.
However, under the logic of luxury capitalism, the mask becomes an index of status, not spirituality. Its meaning shifts from invocation to consumption. The woman who carries it may not know the mask’s original context, but she knows it signals taste.
This transformation exposes how value migrates from ritual efficacy to market prestige, mirroring how colonial modernity displaced African spiritual systems with capitalist hierarchies of worth.
For Labrum London, founded by designer Foday Dumbuya, the Nomoli from Sierra Leone has become a motif bridging the diaspora and heritage. The Nomoli are ancient stone figurines—carved primarily from soapstone between the 8th and 16th centuries CE by the Sapi people, ancestors of modern Temne, Bullom, and Baga communities.
These sculptures were created centuries before the Mende and Kissi peoples occupied southeastern Sierra Leone. When these later groups discovered the figures in their fields and forests, they gave them new spiritual meanings. “Nomoli” is the Mende word meaning “found spirits”—describing what they discovered, not what they created. In this reinterpretation, the figures became intermediaries between the human and the divine, believed to embody ancestral spirits and bring good health, prosperity, and cosmic balance.
Labrum’s 2022 collection reintroduced this sacred figure into the vocabulary of contemporary fashion. Embroidered on tailored jackets and shirts, or abstracted into graphic prints, the Nomoli has since become the brand’s official logo—enlarged and worn on models, replicated for art installations, translating ancestral iconography into diaspora luxury.
Unlike museum displays that isolate African objects from living cultures, Dumbuya’s use of the Nomoli stages diaspora continuity—a dialogue between West African spirituality and London modernity. His work demonstrates the pattern of collaboration he’s established with craftspeople in Freetown, ensuring economic benefit flows back to source communities.
Yet even this diaspora reclamation is not immune to critique. Once the Nomoli enters luxury circuits, it loses some ritual potency and gains brand legibility. It becomes part of the global fashion archive, where symbols circulate detached from their sacred geographies.
The question persists: when does homage become appropriation, even when done by Africans themselves?
Few symbols embody the politics of African adornment as vividly as the cowrie shell. Once used as currency from at least the 14th century across West and Central Africa, serving as divination tool and fertility emblem, the cowrie holds centuries of meaning.
Lafalaise Dion, the Ivorian designer and artist, elevates cowries into monumental headpieces, sometimes casting them in gold or enlarging them into sculptural forms. Her work exudes reverence and empowerment; the cowrie becomes both ancestral and avant-garde. Her 2018 breakthrough piece—which she titled “Queen of Cowries,” a name she’s since claimed as her creative identity—marked her journey after traveling to West Ivory Coast to reconnect with her Dan heritage.
Nevertheless, the literal transformation of cowries into luxury items reveals the capitalist absorption of the sacred. The shell that once mediated spiritual and economic exchange in precolonial Africa now performs symbolic value in the global luxury economy. It’s as if capitalism has consumed not only Africa’s resources but its ritual metaphors of value, converting spiritual currency into fashion currency.
Across these examples, African designers walk a fine line between honor and extraction, revival and erasure. They are not appropriating foreign cultures but reclaiming ancestral archives. Yet the global system into which their work circulates rewards aestheticization over reverence.
A ritual bronze on the runway may appear as avant-garde drama to European audiences; its spiritual resonance, however, becomes secondary to its spectacle value. This aesthetic consumption of the sacred mirrors the colonial gaze that once exoticized African bodies and objects.
Yet designers are not passive participants in this system. They employ deliberate strategies of resistance. Ogisi stages fashion as ritual performance rather than commodity display. Dumbuya collaborates with Sierra Leonean craftspeople, ensuring economic benefit flows back to source communities. Some designers limit production deliberately, pricing work beyond mass circulation, or exhibiting in museum contexts that restore contemplative rather than consumer gazes.
These interventions don’t resolve the contradiction, but they refuse to be complicit in it.
The central question, then, is not whether African designers should use sacred symbols. It is whether sacred meaning can survive capitalist abstraction. Under luxury capitalism, everything sacred becomes surface: bronze accessories become jewelry, masks become bags, cowries become couture. Ritual knowledge, once collective, oral, and embodied, becomes intellectual property, branding, or styling language.
But perhaps the power of these designers lies precisely in their ability to contaminate the market—to smuggle ritual power into systems that once sought to annihilate it. Even when commodified, their designs still carry ancestral memory. They make luxury capitalism speak in languages it cannot fully control.
African ritual aesthetics may not escape the market, but they refuse to be domesticated by it. And that refusal, quiet and persistent, is itself a form of resistance.
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