Kusi Kubi on PALMWINE IceCREAM SS26, Craft, and His Mother’s Wardrobe

PALMWINE IceCREAM, the Ghana–London brand led by designer Kusi Kubi, released its SS26 campaign this week. Photographed in New York by Myles Loftin, the imagery marks a shift for a brand built between continents: quieter, more controlled, more personal.
Founded in 2020 in Accra, PALMWINE IceCREAM has always existed between worlds. Kubi splits his time between Accra and London, though much of the work happens in Ghana, where he collaborates with local artisans using natural tie-dye processes rooted in ancestral craft. “Each continent gives you a different sort of inspiration,” he says. “With West Africa, especially Ghana, where I’m from, my inspiration comes from all the artisans around. The leathers we use are fully upcycled, they are all tie-dye, hand-dyed in the sun, natural old African techniques.” SS26, like previous collections, is handmade in Ghana using upcycled and deadstock materials. “There was no sort of textbook… Everything that we have now is things that we have to research ourselves and implement ourselves. With African tradition, a lot of things are passed from generation to generation by word of mouth… a lot of things are not really written, so some of the information gets lost.”

For SS26, Kubi describes a quieter, more assured moment for the brand. “We were able to upgrade our silhouettes and patterns and just the dynamic of the whole worldview of the brand,” he explains. The shift is toward a more controlled sensuality: “For SS26, we introduced more feminine silhouettes… Spring/Summer is more refined. I think it’s just more grown, a bit more sexy, more feminine.” At the emotional core of the collection are the women in his life. “I have a lot of strong, beautiful women who are so talented and inspire me daily. So I think I wanted to create something inspired by them.”

That thread runs through to a ballerina-inspired dress rooted in a specific memory: his mother’s wardrobe. “This comes from an inspiration from my mom’s wardrobe… She had something, but I just added a little bit ballerina effects at the bottom. The silhouette was always in the wardrobe.” His mother, he explains, remains his primary reference point each season. “She would always say to you, ‘You never know who you meet. So when you leave the house, you have to make sure that you’re presentable.’ When I start a season, I go through her wardrobe… it’s always going to be my mom as a starting point.”

The campaign came together during Kubi’s New York visit. Loftin attended a PALMWINE IceCREAM pop-up and the collaboration followed naturally. “Myles came to the pop-up and he was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this,'” Kubi recalls. “He understands the city, because that’s his city, and he also has an understanding of what I want with the brand. He’s able to mix everything together and then create images and establish a collectible world. The images are really, really sexy. Very sexy, but in a very refined way.” That balance — between sensuality and restraint, between Accra and London, between ancestral craft and contemporary image-making — is where PALMWINE IceCREAM continues to locate itself. “Sometimes there’s a very cliché aesthetic of how people do African designs and African fashion. I wanted to push the image forward,” Kubi says. “Show things that were a bit more grown and sexy, and fun as well. It’s always good to have some humor in the collection and be playful, but be very creative at the same time.”