Can a Piece of Clothing Bring You Home?
For Kimanzi, a Kenyan living in Riverside, California, home fits inside a scarf. When she left Kenya for the United States at 17, she had only two suitcases and a carry-on. Every item she packed meant another had to be left behind. Among the things she refused to leave was a kitenge scarf that had […]
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 First Release: TEMESGEN’s Second Chapter
In Amharic, temesgen (ተመስገን) means gratitude, a name rooted in appreciation, reflection and connection. For the Stockholm-based label TEMESGEN, gratitude is not simply a word but a philosophy: a way of honoring where one comes from while imagining what can be built from that foundation. At Guzangs, we have followed TEMESGEN since its earliest chapter. […]
Who Gets to Write the Future of Fashion?
The mopani worm is one of Southern Africa’s most familiar delicacies. It is also, at the end of this month in Cape Town, the name attached to a silk, one of a slate of materials asking whether the continent’s next fibre industry is already here: in its rivers, farmlands and forests, in leathers tanned from […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place. Even as African artists helped shape contemporary art globally, the continent itself often seemed pushed to the margins, present but not always fully seen, its stories and forms framed through a Western lens or treated as something separate from […]
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 […]
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 […]