• Saskia Houtwin

  Africa correspondent

African fashion is booming. If you walk the streets of Lagos, Kinshasa or Nairobi, you won’t be able to ignore the thriving fashion industry. Ateliers, storefronts and fashion shows: the world of African fashion is bigger than ever. You can also read this in the figures recently published by the United Nations UNESCO registered: The value of the clothing and footwear industry in Sub-Saharan Africa was approximately €30 billion in 2020.

Africa’s middle class is growing at an astonishing pace, and so is its young population. Add to this the possibilities offered by social media and other technologies, and you will understand why UNESCO predicts that demand for African design will increase by more than 40 percent in the next ten years.

African designer clothing is also often worn beyond the continent’s borders. Consider, for example, American pop star Miley Cyrus, who was photographed on a plane wearing a suit designed by South African designer Thebe Magogo. Or the international star Beyoncé, who appeared in the musical film Black is king She wears high-end fashion from designers from Eritrea, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

Dakar, the capital of Senegal, is one of the most famous fashion centers on the continent. “I see a lot of progress,” says Sophie Nzinga Sy, fashion designer and founder of the Dakar Fashion Hub Training Institute. “What I want to do here is train the new generation of African fashion designers.”

Reporter Saskia Houtwin visited Dakar Fashion center:

You’ll find more of these types of initiatives in Senegal. Take Germany’s Goethe-Institut, which offers courses for up-and-coming designers through its ModeLab Academy. At the graduation ceremony, Lohita Lindera proudly presents her creations: a set of custom jackets and four bamboo backpacks on the table, the design of which was inspired by the baskets that farmers in her home country, Gabon, use when they work in the fields.

“The problem is that consumers often find African design too expensive,” says Lindera. “But it is important to value the local price. It costs money to make clothes: for materials, for labor.”

African fashion is full of opportunities for young entrepreneurs, but there are many challenges. “Fabrics are not often made locally, and it costs a lot of money to import them,” says Sophie Nzinga Sy. “Then there is used clothing from the West that gets thrown away here. That makes it very difficult to be a designer here.”

Lohita Lindera wants to work more with local materials and encourages other designers to do the same: “We have a lot of natural materials here: bamboo, agave, palm, pineapple – yes, you can make leather from pineapple. We grow cotton here,” but we don’t have a factory. Ours for shirts, isn’t that weird? “I hope that in the future we can make our own sustainable fabrics.”