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The landmark Africa Fashion exhibition held early this year at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which ran from July 2022 to April 2023, was a game-changer for the global prominence of African fashion.
Curated to celebrate the continent’s vitality and innovation in the fashion world, the exhibition brought together a selection of fashion creatives from over 20 countries who have been at the vanguard of African fashion from the twentieth century to today.
Dr Christine Checinska, the lead curator of the exhibition, sought to challenge misconceptions surrounding African fashion, allowing the varied and multiple sources of inspiration, creativity, and visions of African creators to speak for themselves.
Commentators, while recognising that the exhibition was held in a former colonial power, also hailed the event as a major step in de-centralising global fashion from the dominant fashion capitals of New York, London, Paris, and Milan.
African fashion on the rise
Africa’s fashion sector is brimming with opportunities, driven by the rise of the middle class, a young and growing population, rapid urbanisation, and the emergence of digital technologies, A UNESCO first-ever report on the African fashion industry entitled, ‘The African Fashion Sector: Trends, Challenges & Opportunities for Growth’.
At present, the African fashion sector is a hothouse of remarkable talent and potential, with established and emerging creators and designers. These combine traditional know-how with innovation and creativity to create products that run the gamut between exquisite high fashion and mass-produced affordable garments and accessories.
Thanks to their unique heritage, unreplicable technical skills, and distinctive creative vision; contemporary African fashion designers connect the dots between the past and present, tapping into their cultural roots to create clothes and accessories.
Contemporary fashion in many African countries continues, in an age of increasingly globalised visual cultures, to mobilise strong local aesthetics often linked to specific textiles and, in some cases, types of garments.
Textiles derived from historical traditions or more recent processes of cultural hybridisation — aso-oke, bogolan, toghu, kuba, odelela, lambahoany, kanga, and Berber wool, alongside African wax prints, bazin, and African lace — are fashioned into globally standard designs as well as a myriad of dress styles particular to various regions of the continent, such as agbadas, boubous, kaftans, gandouras, djellabas, hager bahel, gomesi, and umwiteru.
Local and regional preferences co-exist alongside globalized aesthetics in a combination that often gives African designers a unique and distinctive touch. Most importantly, a growing appetite for specific African textiles and styles generates sustained and significant demand for made-in-Africa fashion.
This trend is manifest in the continued prominence of bespoke tailoring in many African countries, despite the ready availability of cheap second-hand clothing imports and low-cost garments imported from outside the continent.
It is also embodied by the creativity of many African high fashion designers and the more than 30 fashion weeks organized across the continent every year. The fashion ecosystem in Africa is complex and multilayered, but at its core are designers, stylists, tailors/ seamstresses, and craftspeople who evolve alongside each other, responding to the needs (and budgets) of different audiences, creating high fashion, ready-to-wear, and mass-produced garments and accessories.
The bulk of African fashion businesses are micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which tend to serve a hyper-local market with ready-to-wear and made-to-order clothes and accessories. A small number of high fashion brands, mostly concentrated in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa provide luxury products for a small group of local and international clients with a high purchasing power.
Market drivers
The 2023 Africa Wealth Report, nonetheless also provides more reasons for a cautiously positive outlook on the continent’s luxury market: it forecasts a 42 per cent rise in the number of African dollar millionaires in the next ten years, reaching around 195,000 by 2031. The strongest growth in high-net-worth individuals, moreover, is spread across African countries as diverse as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, and Zambia.
Furthermore, since international luxury brands currently have a very limited presence in African countries; African luxury brands therefore have an opportunity as first-movers for this growing wealthy segment.
They are players who understand local tastes and aesthetics to ensure that the continent’s luxury spending goes towards made-in-Africa. Today, cities such as Abidjan, Casablanca, Dakar, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Nairobi are nexuses for fashion and design, as well as financial and commercial hubs.
Other cities and regions on the continent are also experiencing significant development in the fashion sector, from the production of raw materials to textiles and accessories.
However, the African fashion sector still struggles to reach its full potential due to obstacles such as a persistent lack of investment and infrastructure, limited educational and training systems, insufficient intellectual property protection, and difficulties in accessing new markets and sourcing quality materials at an affordable price.
Talent, and more talent
Closer to home, Eastern Africa is a contrasted region; it is home both to historic and strongly emerging global garment producers as to countries with stagnant or declining fashion sectors.
Mauritius was the first African country to successfully integrate its garment production into global value chains from the 1980s; Madagascar soon after followed suit. Today, the emergence of Ethiopia and Kenya has led to the speculation of whether the region may become the next hub for global garment outsourcing.
Many of the region’s countries grow cotton (Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan, Sudan, United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda), and efforts are underway in many of these countries to increase the processing of raw cotton into textiles, as well as to increase cotton cultivation in line with textile production ambitions.
In the drive for industrialisation of the textile and garments sector, small-scale artisanal manufacturing sometimes lacks policy attention and is insufficiently integrated with larger scale production. Nonetheless, handwoven fabrics remain quite strongly relevant in Ethiopia and Eritrea, while in Uganda there is a revived, but still small, interest in revitalising bark cloth fabric.
Industrial production of textiles such as wax prints (kitenge), kangas and kikoys is quite strong in the region, although industry insiders note that the quality is not always optimal for clothing design. Production of designer leather accessories is fast growing in Ethiopia and Kenya, while South Sudan shows nascent signs of a leather sector with the brand Mayo Leather releasing the first made-in-South-Sudan leather collection in 2022.
Future growth; Fintech and Metaverse
In addition to this thriving creative ecosystem described above and rising consumer incomes, which are fuelling an ever-growing demand for African fashion.
Two other factors have been key in supercharging the sector: the boom in online shopping and the growing increase in intra-regional trade in the wake of the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
The share of active e-commerce customers is expected to rise to 50% by 2025.
In several African countries, the digital economy is becoming one of the main drivers of growth, accounting for more than 5% of GDP.
Today, there are 816 million mobile SIM connections in Sub-Saharan Africa with 77% penetration and 712 million in the Middle East and North Africa at 116% penetration. Regardless of size or formality, a wide array of fashion enterprises is seizing new marketing and distribution possibilities offered by the internet and social media to reach domestic, regional, diaspora, and other international markets.
Informal garment producers, tailors, and retailers are actively mobilising social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook to reach customers, often making the most of mobile money payment systems ubiquitous in many African countries for domestic and regional sales.
Large brands, as well as a few smaller brands in the luxury segment, run their own e-commerce sites, but many enterprises are benefiting above all from the rise of online platforms that aggregate the offerings of several brands.
A new genre of key fashion sector players has emerged with these developments: fashion fintech (financial technology) where entrepreneurs are behind many of the platforms that enable designers to reach more lucrative markets.
For instance, Ghanaian Sam Mensah Jr., a former finance executive at Deutsche Bank and Intel Capital, is behind the South African fashion brand Kisua, which shot to global fame when Beyoncé was spotted wearing a Kisua jacket in 2015. He set up the fashion house by pulling together a team with experience in global logistics, as well as fashion.
Digital technologies are poised to continue playing a pivotal role in the growth of the African fashion sector beyond e-commerce. In particular, the integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the industry, remains minimal and focused on the luxury segment of the market. It offers a novel and immersive way for customers to Digital Fashion Week, or AR-enabled try-on experiences for African fashion.
Virtual fashion showcases, like the ECLETIC collection presented by Aisha Oladimegi from Nigeria during New York Fashion Week, and those offered by the South African platform Reka, allow consumers to interact with African fashion in a new way.
The metaverse also represents a new frontier for African fashion, offering new opportunities for self-expression through clothes and virtual personas, as well as new spaces for brands to engage with customers.
Recent research conducted by Analysis Group with the support of Meta estimates that it could add USD40 billion to sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP within the next decade, with African metaverses such as Africarare, Ubuntuland or Astraverse poised to drive the sale of digital-only fashion goods.
Building a robust ecosystem
Audrey Azoulay Director-General of UNESCO suggests that to build a robust and virtuous fashion ecosystem, governments and decision-makers need reliable data and contributions from experts and civil society.
“For this sector to remain a driver of innovation and creativity, it must also reflect the continent’s cultural diversity, including its rich textile traditions, some of which have been inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage lists,” Audrey says.