It is a cliché to write about “African fashion” as if 54 countries made one industry. It would be like covering New York, Paris and Milan under the heading “Northern fashion.” The more accurate story is a handful of cities, each with its own institutions, crafts and markets. Increasingly they are connected to each other, and to New York, on their own terms.
Lagos: building the infrastructure
Omoyemi Akerele founded Lagos Fashion Week in 2011, and her business-development agency, Style House Files, produces it. Its 2025 edition, the event’s 15th year, ran from October 29 to November 2. It featured Nigerian labels such as Iamisigo, Orange Culture and This Is Us alongside designers from Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal, according to BoF.
A week later, on November 5, 2025, Lagos Fashion Week won the Earthshot Prize in the “Build a Waste-Free World” category. The award came with £1 million, and the winners were chosen from nearly 2,500 nominations across 72 countries. The prize organizers note that every designer who wants to show at Lagos must demonstrate sustainable practice, from how materials are sourced and dyed to how garments are produced and transported. They also say the week plans to replicate its model in Kigali, Dakar and Accra by 2030.
The talent pipeline matters as much as the shows. Akerele has described Fashion Focus, originally called Young Designer of the Year, as the week’s channel for new talent, with alumni including Orange Culture, Kenneth Ize and Lagos Space Programme. That last label, Adeju Thompson’s non-binary, conceptual line, won the 2023 International Woolmark Prize. Its own site now points to a presence at the Oculus at the World Trade Center in New York.
Dakar: two decades of platform-building
Dakar Fashion Week has run since 2002 under its founder, the Senegalese designer Adama Paris, and its stated mission is to sell African savoir-faire and craftsmanship proudly, in Africa and to the world. The city’s place on the global map grew in December 2022, when Chanel staged its Métiers d’Art show in Dakar, the house’s first show in Africa.
Accra: luxury and the afterlife of clothes
Accra is home to Christie Brown, the luxury house Aisha Ayensu founded in 2008. It is also at the center of fashion’s waste debate. Kantamanto Market, one of the world’s largest secondhand clothing markets, receives most of the roughly 15 million used garments that CNN reports arrive in Ghana every week. About 40 percent of them eventually end up as waste. The Or Foundation, a nonprofit working primarily in Ghana, works with the market’s traders and tailors on reuse. In 2025 it also brought designers to Lagos Fashion Week. For designers working with upcycling, Kantamanto is both a case study and a lesson in where clothes end up.
Johannesburg: the prize that changed the map
In 2019 Johannesburg-based Thebe Magugu became the first designer from Africa to win the LVMH Prize. South African Fashion Week runs its own New Talent Search competition, a route worth knowing for anyone building a label there.
Nairobi: handwork at the center
In September 2026, Kenyan designer Anil Padia won the LVMH Prize’s Savoir-Faire Prize for his label Yoshita 1967. The prize is worth €200,000, and LVMH’s embroidery specialist Maison Vermont will add €50,000 of embellishments. The brand says each piece is handmade in its Nairobi atelier. It works with women-led craft communities and draws on Padia’s Kenyan-Indian heritage.
Why this matters in New York
New York has already shown its appetite. In 2023 the Brooklyn Museum hosted the North American debut of the V&A’s Africa Fashion exhibition. The useful response for MOAM’s readers is not to “discover” these cities but to work with them: book their photographers and stylists when they are in town, stock their designers, collaborate on equal terms and credit everyone properly.
MOAM’s directory is open to talent based outside New York who work with the city. Get listed or tell us who we should be covering via contact.
Editor’s note: facts in this article were checked against the linked sources in October 2026. Details such as dates and deadlines can change, so confirm with the organizers before you plan.
Photo credits: “Aso Oke headtie” by Jeremyida002, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en); “Aso oke making process 4” by Pet002, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0); “Dakar, Senegal 14. ožujka 2026” by August Dominus, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en); “Johannesburg Commissioner St 02” by Adamina, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0); “Plage des mamelles, Dakar, Sénégal” by Tbo47, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0); “Skyline of Nairobi city as seen from Uhuru Park” by DesiBoy101, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0); “Traditional Tafi kente weaving” by Warmglow, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)
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