Nigerian fashion pioneer Folashade 'Shade' Thomas-Fahm will be celebrated at 'Africa Fashion' exhibition - CNN |
- Nigerian fashion pioneer Folashade 'Shade' Thomas-Fahm will be celebrated at 'Africa Fashion' exhibition - CNN
- From New York to Paris, in-person fashion shows are back - Vogue Business
- How The Sewing Machine Gave Power — And Fashion Cred — To African Women - WXXI News
- Meet the female founder who is revolutionizing fashion with your old socks - TODAY
| Posted: 14 May 2021 01:16 AM PDT She's been called one of Africa's most important designers, and a pioneering figure in Nigerian fashion. Now, Folashade "Shade" Thomas-Fahm is among the names being celebrated by London's Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum. Set to open next year, its Africa Fashion exhibition will commemorate past and contemporary African designers including Mali's Chris Seydou and Ghana's Kofi Ansah. Often described as the country's first modern designer, Thomas-Fahm is a former president of the Fashion Designers Association of Nigeria and received a lifetime achievement award at Arise Magazine's Fashion Week in Lagos in 2011. But an illustrious career in fashion wasn't on the cards when she first moved from Lagos to London in 1953. Initially planning to train as a nurse, she recalls changing her mind after seeing shop window displays as she walked around the city. "I knew there and then that fashion was my calling," she said.  Folashade "Shade" Thomas-Fahm in the 1970s. Credit: Shade Thomas-Fahm/Courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
Gaining independenceAfter studying fashion in London, Thomas-Fahm returned to Nigeria and opened a factory and boutique under the name Maison Shade (later Shade's Boutique), which became a go-to place for those in search of contemporary fashions. In the 1960s she became known for using traditional Nigerian textiles. Her foray into the fashion world took place in tandem with independence movements across the continent. "In the 50s and 60s there was a kind of confusion about our identity," she said. "Everything Western was being praised and nobody seemed to care about our own indigenously produced materials. I just never felt that way." Steering the V&A exhibition is the museum's curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion, Christine Checinska. For the past year she's been speaking to icons of the industry, including Thomas-Fahm. Checinska said Thomas-Fahm's re-evaluation of indigenous textiles and silhouettes chimed with the coming of independence for many African nations and women, symbolizing an affirmation of African identities. "That moment of independence and liberation constituted this moment of pride in being African, pride in being Black," said Checinska. "There was a real galvanization of creativity around the arts, but in particular within fashion. You had wonderful designers like Shade Thomas-Fahm bubbling up during those years," she added. "We want to give a platform for iconic designers like Shade Thomas-Fahm. It is important to play a part in ensuring that her contribution to global fashion history is recognized." Checinska also notes the importance of celebrating the diversity of fashions across the continent. She said that all too often, representations of Africa focus on what's lacking. "We want our starting point to be about abundance and diversity."  A flyer for Shade's Boutique, 1971. Credit: Shade Thomas-Fahm/Courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum To capture the cultural footprint of the industry, which goes far beyond the continent itself, the exhibition issued a call-out to the public for personal testimonies from those who have worn designers' garments, and for rare examples of their work. Involving the public is important to Checinska because it speaks to the way that clothes serve as a tool for self-representation. "Coming from the African diaspora myself, I was very mindful of the place of fashion in most people's everyday life," she said. "The way we dress can shape and reflect the way we feel. It can allow us to push against society's borders that might hem us in and make us smaller or invisible. By wearing something on your body, in the way that you put yourself together, you can push back against society's hierarchies and values," she added.
A bright futureAs well as pioneers, the exhibition will celebrate today's ground-breaking designers. Checinska highlights Nkwo Onwuka as a designer to watch. Her Nigerian brand NKWO aims to reduce textile waste by creating limited edition pieces from upcycled denim, end-of-line fabrics and cutting-table waste. "Fashion coming from the continent can be more than just print and color. There are textural elements, form and function," Onwuka said.  Designer Nkwo Onwuka greets the audience during Arise Fashion Week on April 21, 2019 in Lagos, Nigeria. Credit: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images She said she is excited to be continuing Thomas-Fahm's legacy. "One of the things about Shade's work that stood out to me was the way she insisted on using iconic Nigerian fabrics and styles at a time when most of the society women felt that our local fashion items were inferior," Onwuka said. "I show that it is important to value what we have and that through innovation, we can wear clothing that tells the African story in a way that is not Western but truly modern," she added. Thomas-Fahm agrees. "So many things the world enjoys came from Africa," she said. "I think it's about time that they stop pretending they don't get so many of their ideas from us."  |
| From New York to Paris, in-person fashion shows are back - Vogue Business Posted: 13 May 2021 09:50 PM PDT  To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here. New York Fashion Week (NYFW) in September will be a mix of physical shows and digital events, the latest sign that the fashion world may be inching back to the traditional in-person events that were the norm before the pandemic forced everything to go virtual. The event, scheduled for 8-12 September, gained the commitment of 11 leading designers that will present their collections at NYFW for three seasons, according to IMG, which produces shows for NYFW. Telfar, Proenza Schouler, Rodarte, Brandon Maxwell, Altuzarra, Jason Wu, Monse, Prabal Gurung, Sergio Hudson, LaQuan Smith and Markarian have formed a "Fashion Alliance" that will be a cornerstone for NYFW, IMG revealed on Wednesday. In exchange, IMG and new sponsor Afterpay will help fund the designers' shows or events. With normal lockdown restrictions loosening, NYFW will be back in a "big" way, says Leslie Russo, president of global fashion events for IMG. Physical runway shows are powerful in the way they harness the presence of the "right" people — executives, editors, celebrities and influencers — who travel between the world's fashion capitals, to keep the wheels of a multi-million-dollar industry that brings both investment and tourist spending into New York, London, Milan and Paris whirring. Over the past year, all of that had been erased by the pandemic. The four cities missed out on more than $600 million in economic activity at the most recent Autumn/Winter 2021 season, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.  |
| How The Sewing Machine Gave Power — And Fashion Cred — To African Women - WXXI News Posted: 13 May 2021 11:05 AM PDT In the fashion world, a "lookbook" is a collection of photos highlighting, say, a fashion designer's work or a fashion model. The African Lookbook has a different agenda: images that present a stereotype-busting way to look at African women, their relationship with fashion — and their ability to turn the sewing machine from a tool synonymous with toil, lack of choice and oppression into a means for them to achieve economic power. Indeed, African American author Catherine McKinley bends, stretches and tears the fabric of what mainstream history has been telling us about African women in the clothing industry with a visual history of the 100-year span her book covers. "I have looked at photography over time — and in the colonial lens, there was always a deliberate effort to make African women look ugly," McKinley told NPR. "Photos such as puberty rites photos: It's almost like colonialists took the most abject, most degraded girls and put them up for entertainment." The book also echoes McKinley's own sense of self as an African American woman. She professes an intimate connection to the photos — as if each person were someone she knew. McKinley spoke with NPR about her book, published in January. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.  How did your love for African cloth and women's fashion come about? I'm a late '60s, '70s, child and I think a lot of it is a kind of nostalgia of that era of Pan-Africanism. As a child, I saw these images of African American families and artists like Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, W.E.B Dubois and Shirley Graham DuBois, Bobby Lee and others who lived and traveled in Africa. I always wanted to [remain in touch with the nostalgia of that era] somehow, which was the beginning of my love for textiles. I lived in an all-white town in Massachusetts that was kind of socially cut off. There was a woman there from Sierra Leone. She was a nurse, and we became very close friends. She gave me a dress once, and the dress was just significant for me. It was the closest I could get to her and what she represented to me as a mother figure. You write about how African women took on the sewing machine as an expression of economic freedom despite the sewing machine being brought in by colonial masters. Can you tell us about that? Sewing machines have troubling history. They arrived on the African continent very close to the time the camera came: around the mid-1800s. They were reserved for the colonialists to use — primarily for making uniforms and clothing for the Empire and to piece together cloth they [colonists] then used in exchange for slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Unlike the camera, Africans were able to quickly democratize the sewing machine, and you would find it in almost every household of some means, on the streets, in ateliers and as part of dowry lists. This made me think again about all the possibilities for this thing — not only in the sense that you can make something beautiful for yourself and others but that it really is an economic tool.  Throughout the book, you speak about cloth as currency and wealth. But you also highlight that West African women in the 1960s were spending between 12-19% of their income on fabric. How can cloth be a source of wealth when people spent so much of their income on it? I think we have to look at that consumption as a kind of banking and an economic system. A lot of that expenditure on cloth would be used as a kind of capital, even if women were using it to sew a dress. Dresses were sewn to still preserve the yard: They would never actually cut the cloth when making a skirt. Rather, they would fold the extra cloth inside so that the skirt could be reopened and there would be two or three yards to recycle or reuse. It was an important source of financial wealth, as women could use the extra cloth to make more clothes for themselves or sell the cloth to other women. Women traders could get store credit from other female traders and then acquire more cloth and more income and insert themselves in the system. It's a kind of interesting and very complex banking system. Going through your images, I couldn't help but think of how fashion was used by women in Southern Africa in various liberation struggles. Who was your favorite and why? I go back to South African singer Miriam Makeba all the time. Because she is so stunning — period. Her fashion history told an entire story of Pan-Africanism and liberation on the continent — a more accurate story of the continent than the textbooks. The iconic photo of her in a leopard-print dress from 1966 is the ultimate expression of modernity, dignity, glamour and selfhood. Every woman should have a dress like that. That is defiance and politics at its best, given the context where African people were subjugated and depicted in a negative light [Makeba is remembered as a symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as well as a fighter against racism worldwide.]  Where are African women participating in the textile industry today? I think there are many more possibilities for fashion entrepreneurs. I've noticed in Ghana that more high-level sewing schools are coming up, with all kinds of new German and Japanese technology. I mean, the internet has just revolutionized the fashion industry. The textile industry is still lagging, though, and the secondhand clothes imports from Western, high-income countries to Africa are a scourge to the environment, public health and the economy. We need to have conversations about how creatives on the African continent can insert themselves into the fashion economy. We need to shift our discussions from fashion and spectacle to a politicized understanding of both pleasure and the trade and power systems in which it operates. For me, African textiles and fashion are a huge part of my education and a part of my expression of closeness and who I am as a Black woman in the world. The point in investigating the history of textiles in Africa is then to give ourselves the spiritual and sartorial and social freedom imbued in them. Masego Madzwamuse is an African feminist, social justice activist and head designer for Bola Nangabe. She also an Aspen New Voices Senior Fellow, class of 2020. Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDMwNjE4NTczMDE0ODY3NTc4NDRlZGNlMw000))  |
| Meet the female founder who is revolutionizing fashion with your old socks - TODAY Posted: 13 May 2021 11:52 AM PDT  We are all works in progress; even the successful women you see owning it on Instagram faced stumbling blocks along the way and continue to work hard to stay at the top of their game. In this series, we're sitting down with the people that inspire us to find out: How'd they do it? And what is success really like? This is "Getting There." Kristy Caylor is the founder and CEO of For Days, a zero-waste clothing company with a pioneering closed-loop system — meaning that everything gets recycled and reused, so nothing is sent to the landfill. Once customers decide an item doesn't suit them any more, they can return it to For Days through the company's swap program. They can even send in old clothes from other brands — think single socks and ratty T-shirts that can't be donated or resold — and For Days will find ways to reuse the textiles. Before that, Caylor founded another clothing company, Maiyet, which infused luxury with sustainability. She spoke to TMRW about her passion for sustainable fashion, how she's trying to revolutionize the industry, and her advice for being a successful entrepreneur. TMRW: What drew you to sustainable fashion? Kristy Caylor: I've been in the fashion industry for about 15 years. I grew up at The Gap — I spent about five years there in very entrepreneurial roles ... everything from product development to design to marketing to strategy to real estate. It was really robust and quite formative. I also spent time in our supply chain. It was then that I saw the magnitude of production for the industry as a whole. Whether it was the Philippines, Vietnam, China — it was really eye-opening, the impact our industry was having on people and the planet. I thought the industry could be more transformative, and I started thinking through fashion as a tool for impact. For me, it felt like the future. What inspired you to start your first company? What I was seeing in fashion as a whole — and this has changed a lot in the last five to seven years — is that people generally thought anything sustainability-oriented was going to be really ugly — or, it's going to be hemp clothes and sold at the flea market. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get into Whole Foods. And I thought, well, that can't be the future. With Maiyet, it was about changing that perception through aesthetics — literally showing the world what sustainability and impact could look like. Instead of selling to Whole Foods, we sold to Barneys and Saks. But, there were still problems. We still had too many seasons. There were too many returns. At that point, I thought, I think we have a problem with the industry as a whole — with waste. We throw 85% of textiles into landfills annually. Why are we doing that? I started learning about regeneration and circular economy, and you've seen that play a significant role in agriculture, with food, but it was harder to figure out for fashion. We have these beautiful raw materials that end up in the trash. Is there any opportunity to regenerate them? How do we incentivize the customer? For me, that was the core unlock. Our relationship to ownership as customers has changed in a lot of product verticals. We no longer need to own things forever. In fact, that can be kind of a drag. Things pile up in our homes and getting rid of them can be hard. Yes, you can resell lightly used goods, but the majority of our closets are not re-sellable, and so they pile up. I look at my own life and it's T-shirts and pajamas and single socks — all the stuff you don't know what to do with. I was like, I think that's where we start. And that's why you created For Days. What are some of the challenges you came across in getting the company off the ground? Well, in our business in particular, because it is the closed loop, that didn't really exist. We couldn't just go out and copy someone else, or borrow something that had already been created. We had to build everything to support this process — designing products in the most sustainable way, creating a customer experience that made it easy, building infrastructure to take the stuff and make sure it gets to the right next spot, and doing it in a way that's affordable for the customer. How do you think the pandemic has affected how we're looking at fashion? When you go through mass fear about health and safety, you start to think about your priorities, and I do think sustainability has emerged as a very important topic for many people. So in some ways, that's been a silver lining. I also think, just plainly, we've all been sitting in our homes and we're looking around at all the stuff we have, and asking ourselves, what is all this? What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a fashion brand with sustainability in mind? Be mindful about design and be mindful about your material choices and know your suppliers really well. Be mindful about what you produce. There's no perfect equation so you have to realize that progress is amazing and improvement is constant, and just keep going. What is your favorite thing about being an entrepreneur? Creating solutions to problems. Thinking about the future. When you're your own boss, you're also the first one in and the last one out and the one on the hook for everything, so it comes with responsibility and burden as well. But I think the opportunity to chart new territory and think outside the box and create is a gift. What's the secret to being a successful entrepreneur? It's having a really strong vision and sticking to it, and knowing the path to getting there is not going to be what you expected. And being very resilient, very gritty. Asking for advice and help when you need it, which is sometimes very difficult for female entrepreneurs, but something I've learned to be better about. Build a strong support system, because you're going to need it, and don't be afraid to lean on it. This interview has been edited and condensed.  |
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