City Codes: Dakar Is Not a Trend

Dakar is forever being discovered as an emerging creative capital, yet its fashion week dates to 2002 and its first world festival of Black arts to 1966. Treating the city as a trend rather than a working system carries a real cost.
What Dakar Built

Adama Paris has spent a quarter of a century taking Dakar Fashion Week out of rooms. The Medina show runs on a street closed for the night. It is free, there is no list, and residents watch from doorways and from the ledges of their own roofs while models pass close enough to touch. There […]
How Dakar Moves

The Ancien Palais de Justice has no business being as beautiful as it is. It is an abandoned colonial courthouse out on Cap Manuel, the sea right behind it, the concrete going soft at the corners, the kind of building the city has been meaning to deal with for as long as I have been […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.

Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]
All Roads Lead To Dakar Fashion Week

On Saturday, May 23, 2026, the road to Dakar Fashion Week officially began with the launch of the Guzangs Expérience in Dakar, the first event of the Road to Dakar Fashion Week and Guzangs’ first on-the-ground activation on the African continent. Conceived in celebration of Dakar Fashion Week’s 25-year legacy, the Guzangs Expérience set the […]
The Woman Behind Dakar Fashion Week

The Woman Behind Dakar Fashion Week Adama Paris built Africa’s longest-running fashion week. Then she put it on the ocean. Adama Amanda Ndiaye, Founder of Dakar Fashion Week. Photography by Mario Epanya There are cities that host fashion weeks, and there are cities that shape them. Dakar belongs to the second kind. The most recent […]
The Trends Defining African Fashion in 2026

If 2025 marked a year of expansion for African fashion—designers embracing quiet luxury, soft
Best of Fashion 2025

African fashion in 2025 was defined by intention. Across runways, campaigns, museums, and community spaces,
Trend Report: Dakar Fashion Week 2025

Dakar Fashion Week’s 24th edition ran three days across three venues
Dakar Fashion Week 2025 Day 3: The Runway Moved to the Atlantic

Dakar Fashion Week closed on the Atlantic. For its final day, the runway moved