NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
The Africa Azzedine Alaïa Carried
Azzedine Alaïa left Tunis as a young man and built his life in Paris, but the leaving was never really finished. “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa,” Olivier Saillard’s exhibition at the couturier’s foundation in the Marais, takes that unfinished departure as its subject. There are around fifty pieces, most of them from the collections Alaïa made […]
The Index Is the Institution
Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation. It returns names, a few studios, an archive or two, a marketplace. The answer arrives as though it were a window onto everything that exists. It is closer to a door that someone else hung, opening onto the rooms they chose […]
Love Has Become Bad Manners
Hasna and Ryan kept giving themselves away, a shoulder leaning in, a collar fixed with a care no collar has ever needed, their bodies doing what bodies do before pride gets involved. Nobody in the room minded that the two of them wanted each other; the discomfort was that the wanting kept showing on their […]
Generational Love
Generational Love sets two couples in Michel Odouffan’s childhood living room and asks them to do the one thing we have trained ourselves out of: to be obvious about wanting each other. Against wax-print backdrops and a familiar red sofa, the newer couple lets the wanting spill over — a hand, a kiss, a head […]
Puma Brought the Continent to Downtown LA. The Postcards Were the Tell
A week before the 2026 World Cup, Puma turned its Salehe Bembury launch in downtown LA into a study in designing an African football moment for the diaspora — and the postcards, not the product, told the real story.
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, […]
What Roland-Garros Inherited from Central Africa
Whenever I tell people I was born and raised in Cameroon, the first thing they bring up is the football. The Indomitable Lions. Roger Milla dancing at the corner flag in 1990. Samuel Eto’o at Barcelona, scoring goals against teams whose names we learned to pronounce just for him. The 1990 World Cup quarter-final against […]
La Vie Est Belle
Makhan Sakho is twenty-six, Guinean and Malian and Congolese by heritage, Parisian by address. He has worked as a model, stylist, producer, and creative director, but the camera is where his vision sits most fully. “I like when the photos speak for themselves,” he says. “The compositions, the colors, the textures — they allow us […]
Novo Atlantico
Tansi Makele is a Franco-Congolese filmmaker who grew up in the Paris suburbs and started making short documentaries at 19. His early work was mostly about dance and movement. Since then he has worked across fashion films, fiction, and experimental video. He cites Khalil Joseph, Terrence Malick, and Spike Lee as reference points, along with […]