Who Made the Welcome
The lion began with a schoolgirl’s drawing. Ndeye Mariama Diop drew the character selected through a national school competition. A second student, Ndeye Khady Kristall Coumbassa, supplied its name. Together their contributions became Ayo, the mascot of the Dakar 2026 Youth Olympic Games. Senegal’s education authorities credit them both. The ministry reports more than 500 […]
From Korhogo Cloth to Digital Print: Alia Baré and the Language of Senufo Textiles
The garments in Alia Baré’s SS26 collection move the way the cloth that inspired them never could. Stylised birds, animals, human figures and hatched borders travel across dresses cut long and light, in a fabric made to drape and follow the body. The imagery is Senufo. The fabric carrying it is not. The Korhogo cloth […]
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 […]
Gora and Fadel
Gora and Fadel is a portrait of chosen brotherhood, made at Lac Rose outside Dakar by photographer Morgane H. Gomez and director Tansi Makele. Its subjects are Gora and Fadel Gningue, two young Senegalese designers, stylists and models whose bond is a matter of heart rather than blood. Shot on Kodak Portra 400 across the […]
Dakar Coast
Dakar Coast is a fashion series made across a single day on the Senegalese coast by Paris-based art director and stylist Romain Antonini and photographer Khaled Fhemy Mamah, with model Pape Diouf. It takes the ordinary traffic of that coastline and dresses it: the fishermen and their pirogues, the roasted peanut seller, the beignet seller, […]
The Machine Has Started Shopping
A hotel in Dakar can lose a booking before anyone at the property knows a traveller is coming. The traveller asks an AI assistant for four nights near the water, under $250 a night, with breakfast and a cancellation policy forgiving enough to survive a changed flight. She does not compare twenty tabs, study three […]
The Money Is the Wrong Shape
The year Beyoncé wore her clothes, Sarah Diouf was still, in effect, her own bank. Building the label meant buying fabric before the money came back and paying tailors before the invoices settled, then finding cash for the samples, the shoots, the customs paperwork and the long quiet months between one burst of global attention […]
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 […]
Africa Grows the Cotton. A Dakar Gathering Asks Who Profits.
The most important fashion event in Dakar this year had less to do with fashion than with industry. For three days in March, the Centre des Expositions de Diamniadio drew manufacturers, policymakers, textile producers, leather experts, investors, designers, entrepreneurs and development partners from across Africa and beyond, gathered for the inaugural Africa Sourcing & Fashion […]