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 […]
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, […]
After the Applause: Heritage Textiles and the Economics of the Runway Moment
Florentina Agu went back to the wood carving workshops she had visited as a child, and many of the artisans her family had once worked with were dead. The ones still alive were in difficult circumstances. Agu’s father had run a wood carving studio in Nigeria that produced parquet flooring and carved objects for sale […]
GTCO Fashion Weekend and Africa’s Creative Economy
For eight years, GTCO Fashion Weekend has operated as both trade fair and runway platform. What began as a bank-sponsored
WORN OUT — Part III: Return to Sender
How African Designers Are Reclaiming Waste and Rewriting Fashion’s Future The bales arrive as they always have — compressed, labeled, shipped across oceans like cargo without conscience. They still overwhelm ports and markets, a visible symptom of a system that hasn’t stopped. But something has shifted in how they’re received. Across Accra, Cairo, Dakar, workshops […]
WORN OUT: The True Cost of Your Donated Clothes
Part I — The History of a Heap Kantamanto doesn’t sleep. It breathes, wheezes, and heaves under the weight of foreign fabrics. Bales arrive daily—tightly bound, often soaked in chemical stench or rainwater from cargo ships—marked “donation” in faded marker. They are not gifts. They are transactions. They are waste. And they are profitable for […]