The Trends That Defined Lagos Fashion Week SS27
Lagos Fashion Week returned for its 16th edition from 28 October to 1 November under the theme “Crafted”, continuing a conversation about heritage and innovation while exploring the knowledge, skill and creative ideas shaping African fashion. The five-day schedule was packed with more than 60 designers, but only a few met the threshold for innovation […]
Making it in Lagos
Titi Ogufere wants Nigerian designers to win international orders and fulfil them at home. She has met designers who make beautiful furniture but cannot produce a hundred pieces when asked.
A Photo Diary of Lagos Fashion Week
For the first time in all my years of attending Lagos Fashion Week, I decided to bring a camera along. Each year, I find myself wondering whether it will follow the same theatrics as the last. There is the Lagos heat, the rush between shows, the politics of who gets to sit in the front […]
The Ceiling Was Always a Dress
Karim Adduchi spent four months researching the Alhambra, then worked with master woodworkers in Amman to carry the Comares ceiling’s geometry onto a dress of inlaid wood.
Who Needs More Clothes When Moses Aina Has Other Ideas
Among them: a ballgown covered in more than 300 Barbie dolls, which the IGBO-SISUN founder calls a love letter to Black femininity.
Ibrahim Mahama Brings Ghana’s Industrial Past to Paris
In 1966, a glass bottle factory opened in Aboso, in southwestern Ghana. It was one of the last large projects started under Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president, before he was overthrown in a military coup that same year. After decades of restructuring and privatisation, the factory was abandoned. According to the Fondation Cartier pour […]
Africa’s Creative Work Is Training AI. Who Makes the Terms Count?
Over six instalments, The Sovereign Stack followed African creative work into the AI systems now being built on top of it: how it is seen, paid for, found, bought, recorded and governed. The season closes on the question beneath every one of them: who can make those systems come and ask, and who will still be there to answer?
Before the House of Vlam, Cape Town’s Queer History Made Space for Ballroom
Editor’s note: Michael van Niekerk is the Mother and founder of the House of Vlam and founder of Keep The Energy. This essay draws on his experience within Cape Town’s ballroom community alongside interviews and historical sources. Cape Town’s ballroom scene is young, but viciously resilient and viciously talented. It is a scene of houses, […]
The Ritual Of Attaya
The Architecture of Taste
In TELLUS, Dickson Mbi Turns to the Mami Wata to Confront Climate Change
When Dickson Mbi found himself fazed by the numerous climate crises gripping the globe in real time, he wondered how he would explain the state of the world to his son. The Olivier-winning choreographer and composer was certain he had to return to the stories from his Cameroonian parents that comforted him growing up in […]