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.
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]