Francis Kéré Builds the Goethe-Institut Dakar from the Ground Up
In Dakar, a new cultural landmark is rising from the soil. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the new Goethe-Institut Senegal turns earth, memory, and craftsmanship toward a new era of African architectural possibility. In Dakar’s Fann neighbourhood, a baobab tree stands at the centre of a building that appears to have grown […]
All Roads Lead To Dakar Fashion Week
On Saturday, May 23, 2026, the road to Dakar Fashion Week officially began with the launch of the Guzangs Expérience in Dakar, the first event of the Road to Dakar Fashion Week and Guzangs’ first on-the-ground activation on the African continent. Conceived in celebration of Dakar Fashion Week’s 25-year legacy, the Guzangs Expérience set the […]
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 […]
At BAKUS ORAYA, Cotton in Its Final State
BAKUS ORAYA is the kind of house that builds its identity by what it leaves out. Since founding the label, Abdoul Manane Bakary has approached fabric as origin rather than ornament, and Coton Brut, the collection he has been refining across multiple shows, has been the long case for that position. The final chapter, presented […]
Huguette Tchiapi’s Debut Begins in Yaoundé
Huguette Tchiapi is continuing an existing convergence, building a fashion brand that brings together the intricacies of her Cameroonian roots and the influence of her British identity. Like most emerging designers, she is deliberate about where her ideas come from. She speaks about influence less as something simply absorbed and more as something that can […]
Architecture Learns to Play
A tennis court is already a diagram, with its rectangle and net and service boxes laid out in white before anyone arrives, and Backyard Community Club, the new tennis facility that DeRoche Projects has just completed in the dense Accra neighbourhood of Osu, takes that familiar diagram and complicates it in ways that turn out […]
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane Two potters, fifty years and two continents apart, both treating the surface of the vessel as something to be marked rather than smoothed. IF YOU LIKE LUCIE RIE Vienna-born, London-based. Rie threw alone from a small mews studio for nearly sixty years, raking sgraffito […]
Africa’s Largest World Cup, Mostly Watched From Home
Ghanaian fans in the stands at AFCON 2023. Photography by Nana Asomani. The visa regime that will keep most African fans out of the stadiums of the 2026 World Cup is the same one that keeps African artists out of biennials, designers out of Paris fashion weeks, and scholars out of the conferences where their […]
Understanding Bògòlanfini: The Malian Textile Written in Mud and Cotton
Bògòlanfini, the mud cloth of Mali, is one of Africa’s oldest living textile traditions. Ugonna-Ora Owoh traces its science, symbolism, and migration — from Bamana villages and the Mali Empire to Chris Seydou’s Paris ateliers and Awa Meïté’s contemporary Bamako-based practice.
What the Met’s 2026 Theme Means in an African Context, and the Designers Shaping the Narrative
As the Costume Institute prepares its “Fashion Is Art” spring exhibition, two African designers — Chelsea Jean Lamm and Sevon Dejana — make the case that the conversation has been alive on the continent all along.