Fashion designer Miller said the Rwandan-made products have been selling out.
Traditional African designs
Emelienne Nyiramana, founder of the Rwandan cooperative Cocoki, will be going to New York for the first time to launch a new fall product line with Miller. Nyiramana was carrying water for 25 cents a day after she lost her father and three brothers to the genocide slaughter. She is now running the cooperative she started two years ago with Indego (it stands for independence, development and governance) and attending the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneur Certificate Program at Rwanda’s School of Finance and Banking. She studies marketing, public relations, human resources, organizational and financial management, and bookkeeping — which, she says, has helped her the most.
In an Indego video, she says that “all the women of Cocoki have a dream: to become rich with their hands.”
“That’s what it’s all about. The women in Africa are acquiring new skills, and people are loving the collections,” Miller said. “It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. I think people like wearing things that feel organic and not like they’re produced in a factory somewhere. A lot of fashion today is so slick. The fabrics came from local African markets.”
Many of the women who were previously making less than a dollar a day are now making six times as much, which often brings them into the middle class in the Rwandan economy, said Conor French, Indego Africa’s chief financial officer.
Because of its work with African women and fashion, Indego Africa is also the subject of a Harvard Business School case study about female empowerment and fair-trade export markets.
“I didn’t know anything about fashion before this,” said French, who pointed out that his digital watch was held together with a hair band as he circulated among models and designers at the African Fashion Week New York pre-show in SoHo. “But I quickly realized the enormous potential of fashion in helping Africa.”
Beyond animal prints
As a DJ spun Femi Kuti and Michael Jackson, a group of young designers and fashion bloggers of African descent who were born in the United States agreed that urban hipsters — with their “man bangs” and skinny jeans — were played out. They proclaimed it the cultural moment for “Afropolitians,” the slang term for a consciousness that blends Africa’s lively prints with vintage cuts and sensibilities that they describe as “the District meets Durban” or “Nairobi meets New York.”
“African fashion is no longer, like, ‘Take me to the zoo,’ with animal patterns. We are way richer than zebra and tiger prints,” said Washington Roberts, 28, who stayed up all night preparing a dress for the SoHo pre-show and works a day job designing jeans for American Rag.
“It’s an exciting time, because our fabrics are just so rich with color and patterns, ” said Darius Wobil, 28, whose Saint Wobil designs were recently featured in Italian Vogue. “Plus, there’s nothing more beautiful than an African woman’s swanlike posture.”
There’s a global Afropolitian culture that the fashion industry “has not fully recognized,” said Celeste Cristine, founder and chief executive of mybennucafe.com, a blog and shop for luxury Afropolitan brands.
“There are African-born residents living in every part of the globe from the U.S. to the U.K. and beyond,” Cristine said. “They are doctors, lawyers, engineers — and while they have strong cultural ties to the continent, they are also very much a part of American and European pop culture, as well. These designers have also emerged to serve this market of consumers.”
Listening nearby was Theresa Frimpomaa, 21, from Ghana, who now lives in the Bronx. Her family wanted her to be a doctor. She read about the fashion event and came with a homemade pink sparkly “look book” of her designs and a friend to model her vibrant dresses. One frock was cut like a short, puffy prom dress but made with West African kente cloth.
“My dad is a pharmacy technician. My sister is a radiologist,” Frimpomaa said as she adjusted her model’s bright orange dress and corralled her onto the cobblestone SoHo street for a photo shoot. “At first, my dad thought fashion was only for lazy people. But I explained to him that this is our chance and this can help Africa. Now, I’m just gonna go for it. In the end, he will be proud.”
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments