The Commercial Life of African Culture
Ownership, rights and distribution shape who profits from the African creative economy, from wax print and photography to Afrobeats.
Young African Photographers Are Looking Back
In 2024, a Nigerian hit found a second life on social media. “Who Get Dat Thing (Remix),” by Dekumzy featuring Slow Dog and Stormrex, began circulating after a group of young Nigerian women recreated the choreography to Stormrex’s verse, dressed in the exaggerated glamour of the late 1990s and early 2000s: fitted tops, low-rise bottoms, […]
The Seedpod and the Skin
In a small room of white walls and warm wood at Singita Kruger National Park, a set of portraits hangs in quiet succession. The men in them appear faceless. Sculptural masks sit where their features should be, and the bodies beneath are still, set against open sky and water. In one, a figure in velvet […]
North African Women Wore the Future First
When Jacqueline West, the costume designer behind the Dune series, began creating Lady Jessica Atreides’s wardrobe, she drew from a striking mix of historical and cultural references. Her designs combined medieval European religious imagery with Middle Eastern and North African dress, making Jessica appear at once regal, mysterious and otherworldly. This borrowing is not unique […]
Holy Dress Codes: What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?
There is usually something immediately legible about religious dress codes. When I see a woman in a hijab, a man in a yarmulke, or a Black American Southern Baptist church hat, I have some sense of who they are — their values, their community, their relationship to God, defined largely on their own terms. In […]
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 […]
Little Lagos
Little Lagos is a documentary series made on and around Rye Lane in Peckham, south London, by Nigerian photographer Adisa Olashile. Begun on Easter Sunday 2025, it follows the Nigerian community that has made this stretch of the city its own: traders setting out fruit before dawn, families leaving church in agbada and gele, market […]
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 […]