A Nigerian designer asked whether we design for our own people or for global validation. I think the question deserves a better answer than either.
I came across an Instagram post this weekend from the founder of Elie Mann, a menswear brand rooted in Nigeria whose positioning I genuinely admire.
“Designed from material, for our way of life, one piece at a time.”
We co-occupy the same space with different POVs and textures, and you know how we are over here - never afraid to celebrate others doing the work.
But it was his question, not his clothes, that stayed with me.
Who exactly are African fashion designers designing for? The person in the market — or global market validation?
It’s an interesting question. It’s also a loaded one.
Loaded because the question itself is a byproduct of a Western-centered world and a capitalist structure that has profited, for centuries, off the creativity, labor, and resources of people of African descent — whether you find yourself African, Caribbean, or African American in this iteration. When your traditions have been strip-mined for runway inspiration while the makers stayed poor, of course “who is this for?” becomes a test of loyalty. But I want to push back on the premise, because I don’t think the two answers he offers are the only ones available.
Here’s mine: African designers have every right to design for the world.
Let me speak for LOVE DOT, because his post made me think hard about our own brand. Some consumers assume that being an African-centered brand means designing traditional silhouettes — that the work is only authentic if it pulls the actual structures and shapes known in Yoruba, Igbo, or Ga dress forward, unchanged. That is not what I do. I don’t design with a traditional aesthetic, and I’m honest about that. What I’m trying to do is take the textile traditions that have been relegated to the sidelines — a beautiful woven kente, akwete, kuba (eventually) — and elevate them into a modern context. New forms. New purposes. New rooms these clothes get to walk into. And critically: the people who create those textiles are compensated, not ripped off — part of a supply chain that’s growing and reaching a global customer. I love seeing women from Ghana to Nigeria to South Africa wearing our pieces. But I’d be lying if I said I design only for them. I design for anyone who wants to walk down the street wearing history and art they actually have an appreciation for.
Which brings us to the word hovering over this whole conversation: appropriation.
As a marketer whose first career was championing multicultural audiences and diverse narratives globally, appropriation is near and dear to my heart. I’ve lived it, I’ve seen it, and it infuriates me. When Louis Vuitton turned the Basotho blanket — a cloth tied to sacred ritual, one that typically sells for under R1,000 (~$77) — into a R33,000 (~$2355) luxury item with no involvement from the Basotho people, that wasn’t homage. Researchers later put it plainly: the collection was received as appropriation precisely because it obscured its Basotho source and presented the work as the fashion house’s own creativity. And it’s not an isolated case — more than a thousand companies have used the Maasai name and image to sell everything from cars to luxury goods while the community saw nothing, which is exactly why the Maasai organized to license their own identity like the intellectual property it is.
So I would never want to be part of that. And yet — this is where the line gets thin, depending on who’s seated at the table. Is it appropriate to take a cloth that has traditionally belonged to a culture and find new ways to share it with the world, while staying connected to the stories and the makers at the center of it? Or is appropriation only when you take and don’t give back — no acknowledgement, no compensation, just commoditization? I believe it’s the latter. The sin was never evolution. The sin is erasure.
Because tradition has always evolved. The Basotho blanket itself began as a European trader’s gift to a king and became, over generations, a national symbol. Cloth moves. Cloth adapts. The question is whether the people at its center move with it. If a fugu finds its way into a silhouette its weavers never imagined, worn in a city they’ve never visited, and the story travels with it and the revenue flows back to them — that’s not theft. That’s a tradition winning new ground on its own terms. Freezing our textiles in amber doesn’t protect the makers; it just guarantees that when the world discovers them anyway — and it will — someone else will be holding the pen and the purse.
There’s a harder question underneath, and it’s the one that actually sits at the center of our brand. Does Africa win? And when I say Africa, I mean the whole of us — the continent and everyone who is a derivative of it. When our traditions are brought back to the forefront in an ownable way that lets the world buy in and finally circulates those dollars back, that can genuinely be a win. But if that’s the path, do we, in the process, let go of some ownership over how that culture and history gets used? That’s the real tension. Validation from the global market is seductive, and chasing it can hollow a brand out until the culture becomes costume. I’ve felt that pull. The discipline is in the intention: I don’t peddle much in Ankara, because it isn’t truly an African textile tradition. I don’t do traditional aesthetics, I can’t do justice. I stay limited on customization because chasing every request turns you into a tailor shop, and there’s no scale — or story — in that.
So, who is African fashion for? For us, first — always. And for everyone willing to wear our history with appreciation, at a price that respects the hands that made it. The designer in Lagos doesn’t owe the world his work. But he doesn’t owe it his smallness, either.
Design for the market.
Design for the world.
Just make sure that when the cloth travels, the story and the money travel with it.
