For centuries, Africa has been underrepresented within the fashion industry. African fashion has mostly been associated with ethnic fashion, overlooking the vast creative potential of an emerging generation of designers and artists.
Today, African creatives are reclaiming the narrative and rethinking contemporary African fashion – challenging and side-stepping (neo)colonial thought patterns and beauty norms.
Fashion Africa Now is here to represent the complex and multifaceted world of African fashion design. As a media brand, we amplify Black voices and tell inspirational, educational and empowering stories about contemporary creative Africa.
What We Do
The Fashion Africa Now Podcast ignites interesting conversations with designers, creatives, historians, researchers, fashion players and industry experts on what fashion in Africa is today.
Magazine: caring through sharing. We want to share Black stories and present outstanding photography of Black culture. With education as an essential focus of our work, there will also be scientific texts on different topics.
Events: cultural celebration. With our edutainment events, we celebrate creativity, culture and identity and allow new conversations to take place. We establish a network that connects the creative scene in Africa and Europe.
Publications: collective storytelling.
Our Founder
Beatrace Angut Oola founded the creative agency APYA Productions in 2012 and launched the pioneering platform Africa Fashion Day Berlin (AFDB) in January 2013. AFDB was relaunched in 2016 as Fashion Africa Now – staying true to its predecessor’s fashion roots, but also branching out into new creative fields. Her passion for contemporary fashion, the difficult access to the fashion industry in Africa and Diaspora as well the lack of coverage led her to found this platform. The platform permanently creates space for afrocentric artistic perspectives from within the collective and develops its own formats that bring new public spheres together.
Become A Fashion Africa Now Friend
Support our educational work on the topic of deconstructing fashion and breaking stereotypes
Become part of the African Fashion Movement and share our stories in your network, recommend or publish our work or support us financially. By helping us to publish a podcast episode, facilitate other guest articles, creating events, talks and lectures.
In addition to our content work, we are always doing what we call “African Fashion advocacy”. For us, this means doing fashion activism, awareness-raising work to be able to tell a new narrative, it requires systematic change in the industry. We believe that the fashion system needs to be deconstructed to be socially just, inclusive and empowering. For this understanding, we network with activists, initiatives, institutions, companies and committed individuals. In 2019, we realised the first fashion exhibition in a design museum with designers of African origin at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. This was partly responsible for our founder finally being able to hold seminars as a lecturer at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, such as Fashioning Africa – Colonial Contiunities, Perspectives and Social Perception in Fashion. We want to get even more involved in this in 2022, so that an academy with BIPOC knowledge in fashion can find space.
Let's talk money.
Honestly, we are a small team with a very high idealistic approach. A lot of what we do, we do because we think it’s right and important and because there has been a eurocentric view on it so far. It’s about raising awareness, acceptance and understanding of new realities of life, as well as presenting a positive image of creativity from the black community and not because it’s financially rewarding. And yet, at the end of the month, we too have to pay our rent to continue to work on Fashion Africa Now and relevant content at the scale we do. That’s why we are so happy if you like our work, if it has helped you in one way or another and if you would like to support us with a budget.
For more information, drop us mail to learn more about how to do that: hello@fashionafricanow.com
