by At a small fashion studio in Lagos, the designers and tailors are busy cutting clean lines through the layers of fabric. “The first thing we produced were cotton T-shirts,” says designer Oroma Cookey-Gam, co-founder of This is Us, which makes contemporary Nigerian designs, from oversized shirts to sweater suits and kaftans, using cotton that produced locally.
To get the cotton, Cookey-Gam makes a monthly trip to the Funtua textile mill, a factory in Katsina in the north, which is one of the few fully functioning mills in the country. She then makes the three-hour journey to the Kofar Mata dye pit in Kano, the oldest dye pit in Nigeria, where the cloth is dyed by hand for up to eight hours into its indigo hues.
Cookey-Gam used to import cotton from Morocco and Turkey but in 2016 she embarked on a year-long search for raw materials in her home country. Although two-thirds of African countries produce cotton, and some of the continent’s largest producers are in west Africa, more than 81% of it is exported from Sub-Saharan countries, leaving little to be used. local. A recent Unesco report warned that exports were limiting the growth of the region’s textile and fashion industries, harming its economic opportunities.
“Africa is exporting something that could create a huge industry and a huge number of jobs,” says Ernesto Ottone, Unesco’s assistant director general for culture.
Nigeria’s textile industry, like others in Africa, flourished in the 60s and 70s but the influx of second-hand and foreign-made clothing into African markets declined following a wave of trade liberalization policies. Now, businesses like This is Us face major challenges when trying to find content.
Ginneries – where the seeds are harvested from cotton – in Nigeria deal with bulk orders and are therefore less interested in selling to fashion start-ups, says Cookey-Gam. “When we first went to the mill, they didn’t take us seriously. They said they can’t work with fashion because the orders aren’t big enough,” she says, explaining how she partnered with other brands to place large orders.
The investors and policy makers do not understand designers who can promote African fashion
Alphadi, fashion designer
Global interest in African-made goods has increased in recent years, fueled by modern representations of the continent in culture, such as the Black Panther films, and the Afrobeats explosion. Black celebrities including Beyoncé, Naomi Campbell and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have promoted the establishment of designers from the region and its diaspora.
A contemporary take on fabrics and structures in African fashion by young people. Designer Sébastien Bazemo from Burkina Faso helped bring the colorful Kôkô Dunda fabric back into style. And now there are more than 30 fashion weeks across the continent every year.
“It’s a season of ownership,” says entrepreneur Omoyemi Akerele who runs the annual Lagos fashion week. “Before this, [the African fashion industry] The Eurocentric outlook has been largely overlooked but in the past few years, creators and designers have been doubling down to express and re-emphasize who they are in a way that is true to them and the communities they represent. .”
“Made in Africa” movements have flourished in recent years, particularly among the continent’s growing middle class, but African creatives say their designs are largely inaccessible on the continent. due to the high costs of producing and importing basic textiles, which affects overall pricing. . Clothes from This is Us cost from about 50,000 to 150,000 Nigerian naira (£50 to £150), and its main clients are Nigerian and African creatives in the diaspora.
Renowned Nigerien designer Alphadi (Sidahmed Seidnaly) supports calls for African governments to limit textile imports and increase production of more than just cotton. Although the visibility of the continent’s fashion has increased, the sector still needs policy and investor support, he says.
“Investors, buyers and policy makers don’t understand the difficulty of being an African designer, who can get away with African fashion,” he says, citing big European names in fashion. “People bet on them, and that can be the difference between making it or not in this industry.”
Despite being one of the continent’s fashion pioneers, the designer, who runs his business in Niamey, the capital of Niger, and in the Ivory Coast and Morocco, says he had to invest a lot of his own money to stay in undertake business.
African fashion investors say investments in individual designers are common but do not address structural issues that financiers and policymakers need to deal with for the industry to thrive, such as local production capacity. Without such measures, they say, investments may result in short-lived success rather than sustainable businesses that can be scaled up.
Roberta Annan, founder of the Impact Fund For African Creatives (IFFAC), a body that invests in creative businesses across Africa, says: “[We need to] looking at building the infrastructure and enabling designers to thrive – so they have access to different textiles locally.”
IFFAC supports sustainable fashion businesses with grants and investments of up to £1.7m to build the sector. It recently bought a factory in Ghana that was previously owned by the government to increase local textile manufacturing capacity. Designers say such measures can be transformative.
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“African fashion is still very young, and we have to [various] elements to make things of high quality,” says Cookey-Gam. “Fashion employs many people and is a tool we can use to make a difference in people’s lives. It can change the continent.”
