The Textiles That Found Home on the Swahili Coast
Explore Swahili Coast textiles, from kanga and kikoi to kitenge and Amerikani, and how Indian Ocean trade shaped East African dress and identity.
From Korhogo Cloth to Digital Print: Alia Baré and the Language of Senufo Textiles
The garments in Alia Baré’s SS26 collection move the way the cloth that inspired them never could. Stylised birds, animals, human figures and hatched borders travel across dresses cut long and light, in a fabric made to drape and follow the body. The imagery is Senufo. The fabric carrying it is not. The Korhogo cloth […]
Adirẹ and the Wrapper-Wearers
My relationship to adirẹ is perhaps an unusual one; it begins not with indigo, but with cassava. In 2024, I returned to Nigeria for a two-month residency with the G.A.S. Foundation to study cassava’s role and cultural significance in the country. It was the longest I had spent in the country since leaving at five […]
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, […]
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.
Guinea: A Textile Civilization in Four Systems
Guinea: A Textile Civilization in Four Systems By Mariama Camara & Oury Sene King of Kindia, c.1910, with two wives in Basse-Guinée textiles (tie-dye, weaving, embroidery). Courtesy of Duncan Clarke, antique postcard and African textile dealer. Guinea, officially the Republic of Guinea, is rarely understood through its material systems. It is more often described through […]
Material Literacy: The Knowledge in Cloth
Mariama Camara on authorship, ownership, and the distance between admiration and accountability.