On November 4, Ghana’s tourism minister stood at the opening of the first Black Star Fashion Week in Accra and named the designers who built the industry. Kofi Ansah. Oswald Boateng. Kofi Okyere-Darko, for his long-running runway show.
The organiser, Rex Omar, then announced a recognition initiative for pioneering figures. These are people, he said, who “have contributed immensely to where we are today, often without the recognition they deserve.”
Recognition is the easy part. It fits on a stage and ends when the lights do. What happens to a pioneer’s work after the applause is a different question, and across the continent the answer is mostly the same: it is kept somewhere else.
The best shows are abroad
Look at where the first generation of African designers has been displayed lately. The V&A’s Africa Fashion gathered 45 designers and about 100 garments, from the early 1960s to now. It named Naïma Bennis, Shade Thomas-Fahm, Chris Seydou, Kofi Ansah and Alphadi as the people who built the industry between the 1960s and the 1990s. The show travelled to Montreal, where it ran until February, and to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, which closed it in July.
At Kent State University Museum in Ohio, A Meeting of Cultures: Fashioning North Africa presented 25 designers and artists from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. The museum calls it the first exhibition in the world on contemporary fashion from those four countries. It came with a 150-page catalogue published by Hirmer.
In Paris, the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa is showing the African influences in Alaïa’s own work until January 4.
These are serious, well-researched shows, and they deserve credit. But a visitor in Montreal or Paris sees a continent’s fashion history in a gallery that is not on the continent. A student in Bamako or Kumasi who wants to study Seydou’s cutting has to find a catalogue first.
What home looks like
At home, the energy is real and it points forward. Addis Ababa Fashion Week marked its 15th edition in January with a turn from spectacle to strategy, slower runways and more room for designers to explain their craft. Accra’s new week took its theme from a slogan, “Put Ghana On,” and promised an annual industry report from 2027.
Neither is an archive. A fashion week is a window onto this season. A report counts the present. Neither tells you what a designer made in 1975, who wore it, or who has the pattern.
The same argument, in film
The question is not only about clothes. In Lagos, Osuofia, the actor Nkem Owoh, said on a talk show that Yoruba filmmakers started the country’s home video industry, and that the name Nollywood arrived years after the films did. He named Hubert Ogunde and Adebayo, and still acknowledged that Kenneth Nnebue’s Living in Bondage, in 1992, drove the industry’s growth.
The origin story is more tangled than the slogan. A recent essay in Africa Is a Country argues that Nollywood has two origins that answer different questions. Yoruba travelling theatre, built by Ogunde’s company from the 1950s, explains where the art form came from. Yoruba filmmakers moved to VHS in 1988, four years before Nnebue’s hit. Nnebue, who by that account had already made at least 27 Yoruba films, built the model that the industry copied for twenty years. Credit tends to go to whoever packaged the story best.
In Ghana, the actor Agya Koo made the practical version of the same point. In an interview on November 3, he asked the government for a national museum of creative arts figures. “We are watching our entertainment legends die without preserving their legacies and that is very frustrating,” he said. He added that Ghanaians tend to honour creatives only after they die.
South Africa offers a quieter contrast. The Trompies, one of kwaito’s founding acts, are still performing three or four times a week. Eugene Mthethwa, one of the original members, told the Mail & Guardian: “I’m still waiting to see the grave of kwaito.” The pioneers are alive, working and being remixed. The record of what they did, in their own words, is mostly in interviews like that one.
What designers lose
When the archive lives elsewhere, the loss is practical. A young designer working with adire, kente or bogolan starts from a textile tradition but not from the work of the people who first turned that tradition into a label. They can see the cloth. They cannot easily see the decisions: the cuts, the fittings, the collections that failed.
This matters now because the cloth is the story. Indigenous textiles were named the leading trend at Lagos Fashion Week last month. A trend rests on a history, and the history of how those textiles became fashion sits in private wardrobes, family attics and foreign catalogues.
What a home archive would need
It does not need to be grand. It needs four things.
A named custodian, whether a university, a museum or a family foundation, so that someone is responsible. A habit of recording while the pioneers are alive: interviews, patterns, sketchbooks, photographs. A plain rule about who owns the images and who may reproduce them, settled before anything is displayed. And a place where a student can ask to see the work without applying to a museum overseas.
Ghana has the tools of a start. It has a minister who named the pioneers, an organiser who promised to honour them and a veteran actor asking for a museum. The question for the next fashion week is whether the honour is a ceremony or the first entry in a catalogue.
Written by Layo
Lead Editorial Writer, Creative Brief Africa
Outside of her editorial work, she writes Curious Health, a newsletter focused on everyday health questions, explored with clarity and care.