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, […]
African Art Doesn’t Need the White Cube
For centuries, African art has thrived through colour, movement and ritual. But as contemporary African galleries rethink how work is shown, the white cube is no longer the only option.
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
Who Gets to Write the Future of Fashion?
The mopani worm is one of Southern Africa’s most familiar delicacies. It is also, at the end of this month in Cape Town, the name attached to a silk, one of a slate of materials asking whether the continent’s next fibre industry is already here: in its rivers, farmlands and forests, in leathers tanned from […]
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane Two potters, fifty years and two continents apart, both treating the surface of the vessel as something to be marked rather than smoothed. IF YOU LIKE LUCIE RIE Vienna-born, London-based. Rie threw alone from a small mews studio for nearly sixty years, raking sgraffito […]
Nine
Bruin Feskens is a self-taught photographer working out of Cape Town. His mother, a photographer herself, started him on commercial sets at fifteen, and the family’s move from the Netherlands to South Africa opened up the landscapes — beaches, greenlands, deserts — that would later anchor his frames. The series Nine began with a cover […]
How to Dress for a Rave (Across African Cities)
To dress for a rave, one must first recognize how raves are buzzing all over our social radar
Between the Algorithm and the Altar
None of it has disappeared — the bridewealth, the communal celebration, the ceremony. But in the 2020s, something is shifting fast.
The Best Places to Propose in Africa: From Cape Town to Marrakech
Proposals in Africa hit different. Maybe it’s the scale (mountains that dwarf your nerves, waterfalls louder
Best of Fashion 2025
African fashion in 2025 was defined by intention. Across runways, campaigns, museums, and community spaces,