At OWO 25, Accra Emerges as the New Capital of Conscious Style
Accra’s Kantamanto Market transformed into a stage of color, ingenuity, and defiance last month. The annual
Kwetu Kwanza 2025: Building Circular Fashion Infrastructure from the Ground Up
As Kwetu Kwanza 2025 opens in Uganda, designers from across Africa redefine circular fashion
The Sustainability Checklist: African Fashion in the Age of Green Demands
While African fashion practices have long been inherently sustainable, designers are now navigating a global system where sustainability means compliance
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 — Part II: How African Governments Are Responding to the Textile Waste Crisis
Western wardrobes don’t end in Europe or North America. They spill quietly, devastatingly onto African soil, packed into shipping containers and sold in open-air markets under the guise of “donations.” But from Accra to Kigali, Dakar to Lusaka, something is shifting. The bales keep arriving. The markets keep choking. But across the continent, a patchwork […]
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 […]
WORN OUT: A Series on Africa and Secondhand Clothing
A three-part Guzangs series on the secondhand clothing trade and the African economies absorbing it. An estimated 15 million used garments enter Ghana every week, most of them shipped from the UK, the US, and China, and a global secondhand trade now worth more than five billion dollars a year treats the continent as its […]
Waste Not, Wear More: African Designers and Artists Upcycle the Future
As the global fashion industry reckons with its massive environmental impact, Africa is quietly leading a creative revolution — one where waste is not discarded but reborn. On this World Environment Day, we turn the spotlight to a growing community of African designers and artists transforming textile scraps, plastic, and secondhand clothing into vibrant works […]