In Côte d’Ivoire, a New Generation Learns to Read the Waves
Along the Ivorian coastline, the ocean has never been a playground. It feeds families, holds spirits and commands a caution passed down through generations. For most of the country’s history, almost nobody looked at those waves and imagined riding them. The Rising Dawn, a feature documentary by Ivorian filmmakers Nadi Saddy and Nuits Balnéaires, is […]
Akin Faminu on Style, Taste and the Things He Returns To
Akin Faminu can spend one evening watching a 1999 Dolce & Gabbana show and another reading an anatomy textbook from cover to cover. The medical doctor and fashion creator has built a public life around style, but his tastes extend well beyond clothes. For this edition of Word of Mouth, Faminu talks about the designers […]
Before the Album, Rapsody Went to Ghana
Rapsody did not come to Ghana for a show. There was no tour routing to explain the visit, no announced album cycle. She came to walk the country, and she came with questions about where she was from. Amino’s 2025 film, “Rapsody in Ghana, A Conversation With Joseph Amino,” follows those questions through markets and […]
The Mask Does Not Arrive Quietly
At the Festival des Masques in Porto-Novo, music, movement and the reaction of the crowd are part of what photographer Kelvin Selasie Quist remembers most. Over two days in July, he photographed the masquerades moving through the festival, the people gathered around them and the moments in between. “I was drawn to the energy, colors, […]
The Back of the Field
Across Buea, Lagos, Nairobi and Cairo, a running boom is exposing the hidden economics of belonging. Who pays to keep a community free, who profits when it grows, and why not one of six global brands would say what any of it is worth.
Can a Piece of Clothing Bring You Home?
For Kimanzi, a Kenyan living in Riverside, California, home fits inside a scarf. When she left Kenya for the United States at 17, she had only two suitcases and a carry-on. Every item she packed meant another had to be left behind. Among the things she refused to leave was a kitenge scarf that had […]
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, […]
Echoes of Pain
Echoes of Pain is a series of portraits about migration and the grief that travels with it. Made in a forest in Switzerland, it places children among the trees, weary and watchful, unsure of the way out, as a picture of the state Mike Kure calls being physically present but emotionally suspended. Kure began the […]