Luxury African Fashion Wows Europe’s Catwalks

Laduma Ngxokolo can pinpoint the exact moment he became a man – and how it inspired his unique sense of fashion.

In 2004, he spent a month in the wilderness with a troop of young men from his community – all part of a coming-of-age ritual traditionally observed by South Africa’s Xhosa ethnic group.

As per the tradition, Ngxokolo and his fellow initiates were supposed to re-enter society with fresh clothes after their month away.

“It was a British-style, gentleman type of look. So your typical look would be a hunter cap or a hat and a jacket,” Ngxokolo says.

But Ngxokolo decided to fashion his own outfits from scratch, ones more reflective of Xhosa culture.

An outlier among his fellow “amakrwala”, as initiates are called, he emerged from boyhood donning “an accent colour around the calf, around the neck, around the chest… and lots of stripes”.

Having personally witnessed the lack of Xhosa-inspired high-end clothing companies, Ngxokolo began to develop MaXhosa Africa – a designer brand dominated by knitwear and colourful Xhosa patterns.

Since then, MaXhosa has been endorsed by Beyoncé, worn by US musician Alicia Keys, featured in Vogue and will be presenting a new collection at Paris Fashion Week on Sunday.

And Ngxokolo’s not alone – in recent years several African luxury designers have burst onto the global fashion scene.

Since 2019, three South Africans – Thebe Magugu, Lukhanyo Mdingi and Sindiso Khumalo – have bagged the prestigious LVMH Prize for emerging talent. The following year, Beyoncé’s Africa-centred Black Is King film showcased the continent’s leading brands to a Western audience.

Vogue has also increasingly been promoting fashion from Africa – in 2022 a cover story shot in Ghana with actress Michaela Coel went viral.

Africa “holds all the cards to become one of the next world fashion leaders”, according to a 2023 report from the UN’s cultural body Unesco.

This past month goes some way to backing up Unesco’s forecast. Alongside MaXhosa, brands from Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon have been launching new collections at the industry’s “big four” fashion weeks – Paris, Milan, London and New York.

After his show in Paris, ballet dancer-turned-designer Imane Ayissi says “there’s been a “noticeable increase” in African showing at Europe’s fashion weeks.

“Six years ago, there were no designers from Africa in official Western fashion weeks,” he says.

Ayissi, the son of a Cameroonian champion boxer and a beauty queen, sent his models down the Paris runway wearing layers of taffeta and satin, into which he incorporated kente (a handwoven Ghanaian textile) along with traditional fabric from Burkina Faso.

Imane Ayissi’s latest collection juxtaposed materials like satin with traditional African fabric designs
“The main inspiration is the way women, in a lot of different African countries, mostly in Western and Central Africa, use simple pieces of fabrics and drape them around their hips to create a kind of skirt, sometimes with several levels,” the designer says.

But why have African styles and textiles like this seen such a rise in popularity recently?

There are a variety of reasons, one being the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, says Frederica Brooksworth, chief executive of the Council for International African Fashion Education (CIAFE).

“For once, because everything was happening online and not many people were able to do things like fashion weeks, it was an amazing opportunity for Africa’s voice to actually be heard,” she said.

BBC/Jide Johnson.