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 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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Who Trains the Machines That See Africa?
The Sovereign Stack
As AI becomes the infrastructure beneath culture, African creators can no longer
Karibu Nairobi: Stamped and Approved
Sinatra Chumo on reclaiming the postage stamp as a site of cultural critique
The Jersey Economy: Why Africa Is the Most Valuable Untapped Market in Sports Merchandise
There is a version of this story that begins at a football match. Maybe it is a World Cup qualifier
Market Entry Is Not a Mood Board
Market Entry Is Not a Mood Board Why Brands Mistake Aesthetics for Infrastructure and What Credibility Actually Requires Photo: Carlos Idun In recent years, several major fashion houses have staged shows and campaigns across the African continent. Runway presentations in Dakar and Marrakech. Campaign shoots in Lagos and along the Kenyan coast. Capsule collections developed […]
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
The Scaling Gap
Hanifa, Ami Colé, and what the industry’s love can’t build.