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 […]
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?
The Ritual Of Attaya
The Architecture of Taste
Dede Arisekola Is Building a World of Her Own
Most designers at the start of their careers arrive with something to say. Dede Arisekola is charting a less familiar course, guided by a question: “What if the things we inherit were only the beginning of what we could become?” The Irish-born Nigerian designer is interested in the societal expectations woven into the clothes we […]
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.
How Brands Sell Belonging
Belonging is the new currency of African fashion, and the labels that trade in it are turning shoppers into believers.