“Africa Can Be Transformed By Fashion”: The Trailblazing Designers Seeking Unimaginable Opportunities

Style and skill abound, but experts claim that until Africa invests in its textile sector, it will never reach its full potential.
The designers and tailors at a tiny Lagos fashion company are hard at work carving precise lines through the large rolls of cloth. Designer Oroma Cookey-Gam, co-founder of This is Us, says, “Cotton T-shirts were the first item we produced.”
The company uses locally grown cotton to create modern Nigerian designs, such as oversized shirts, jumpsuits, and kaftans.
Cookey-Gam travels to the Funtua textile mill, one of the few fully functional mills in the nation, in Katsina, the northern region, once a month to get the cotton.

The cloth is then hand-dyed into colors of indigo for up to eight hours in the Kofar Mata dye pit in Kano, the oldest pit in Nigeria, a three-hour trip away.
Cookey-Gam used to buy cotton from Turkey and Morocco, but she started a year-long quest in 2016 to find suppliers inside her nation.
Even though cotton is grown in two-thirds of African countries, with some of the continent’s biggest producers located in West Africa, more than 81% of it is exported from sub-Saharan Africa, leaving little for domestic use.
According to recent Unesco research, the region’s economic prospects were being negatively impacted by exports, which were limiting the expansion of the textile and apparel sectors.

Ernesto Ottone is the assistant director-general for culture at Unesco. “Africa is exporting something that could create a huge industry and an enormous number of jobs,” Ottone adds.
Like other African countries, Nigeria’s textile sector flourished in the 1960s and 1970s before collapsing when a flood of secondhand and foreign-made clothing entered the continent as a result of trade liberalization measures.
Nowadays, sourcing materials presents significant hurdles for companies such as This is Us.

According to Cookey-Gam, Nigerian ginsneries, which extract the seeds from cotton, deal with big orders and are hence less interested in selling to fashion companies. “The mill didn’t take us seriously when we initially visited there. She explains how she teamed up with other businesses to generate large purchases, saying, “They said they can’t work with fashion because the orders are not big enough.”

African-made products have become more and more popular throughout the world in recent years, thanks to the rise of Afrobeats and contemporary cultural representations of the continent like the Black Panther movies. Beyoncé, Naomi Campbell, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are among the well-known black individuals who have supported the work of regional and diaspora designers.

Younger people have adopted modern twists in African architecture and materials in fashion. Burkina Faso-born designer Sébastien Bazemo has contributed to the resurgence of fashion for the vibrant Kôkô Dunda cloth. Additionally, there are currently over 30 fashion weeks held annually around the continent.

According to businesswoman Omoyemi Akerele, who oversees Lagos’s yearly fashion week, “it’s a season of ownership.” “In the past few years, creators and designers have doubled down to communicate and re-emphasize who they are in a way that’s true to themselves and the communities they represent. Before now, [the African fashion industry] pandered a bit to the Eurocentric gaze.”

“Made in Africa” campaigns have gained popularity recently, particularly among the continent’s expanding middle class. However, African designers claim that their creations are still too expensive for many Africans to purchase because of the high expenses associated with producing and importing basic materials, which has an impact on final prices.
The primary customer base for This is Us comprises African diaspora residents and Nigerian creatives, with items priced between 50,000 and 150,000 Nigerian naira (£50 and £150).
Famous Nigerien designer Alphadi (Sidahmed Seidnaly) is in favor of proposals for African nations to increase the production of non-cotton textiles and restrict textile imports.
Even though the fashion industry on the continent is becoming more well-known, he claims that policy and investment assistance are still lacking.

Citing well-known European designers, he claims that “investors, buyers, and policymakers, who can make African fashion take off, do not understand the difficulty of being an African designer.” “People wager on them, and in this industry, that can mean the difference between success and failure.”

The designer, who operates in the city of Niger, Niamey, as well as in the Ivory Coast and Morocco, claims that he has had to invest a significant amount of his cash to continue in business, even though he is one of the continent’s fashion pioneers.

African fashion investors claim that while funding individual designers is popular, fundamental problems like local manufacturing capacity that financiers and legislators need to address for the sector to thrive are not addressed. They assert that in the absence of such steps, investments would only result in transient success as opposed to long-lasting, expandable companies.
“We need to look at building the infrastructure and giving the capacity for designers to thrive—for them to access different textiles locally,” says Roberta Annan, creator of the Impact Fund for African Creatives (IFFAC), an organization that invests in creative enterprises across Africa.

To grow the industry, IFFAC provides grants and investments of up to £1.7 million to sustainable fashion enterprises. To boost domestic textile production, it recently purchased a government-owned mill in Ghana.
Such initiatives, according to designers, have the potential to be revolutionary.
According to Cookey-Gam, “African fashion is still very young, and we need [various] elements to make things at high quality.” “Fashion is a tool we can use to improve people’s lives and employs a lot of people.” It has the power to alter the continent.

Content Courtesy of The Guardian & NFH