Aside from the knock-out emerging designers on the Bloom Runway and heavyweight labels on the Main Runway, Portugal Fashion Week 2021 also showcased around 90 global exhibitors at the 49th edition of their accompanying Brand Up! Exhibition. Featuring a wide range of outlets from footwear to accessories, AMAKA caught up with five of the African designers who debuted in Porto thanks to the support of African Export and Import Bank’s Creative Africa Nexus (CANEX) Program.
With footwear brand Shekudo, jewellery makers Adele Dejak and Rokus London, clothing designer Sarayaa, and textile weavers Tsandza, we explore the techniques behind their crafts, collaborations with local craftsmen and women, as well as their sustainability practices.
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AMAKA: Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how your journey in fashion began.
Akudo Iheakanwa, Founder of Shekudo: I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. My dad is Nigerian, and my mom is Australian. I was working in community development, health, and youth work, but I had a brand on the side that I was running with a friend for years. It was more of a passion project that I was working on, creating a little capsule collection every year then I just decided to move to Lagos in 2017. My dad was in Lagos before this. So, I thought okay, why don't I take a break from the work I was doing? Though two years prior, we'd stopped it because we kind of gave up on it. And I said I'm going to take it over and see if I can do some manufacturing in Nigeria. I got there and found that I didn't want to do clothing. I realised the footwear production scene was thriving and very interesting. I wanted to kind of explore that further and see how far we can really push the bar and explore the creative potential behind a lot of the artisans.
Adele Dejak: My journey started in Nigeria. I started collecting artefacts, you know, using my pocket money to buy beads and sort of African artefacts. That is when the whole journey started without me knowing. I took another direction, as you said — law, and I realised that it wasn't my path. I've always been creative, always been into design and so I wasn't sure which direction my creative passion would go in, so I studied graphic design in London, London College of Printing. I'm still passionate about typography and graphic design and the bizarre thing is one of my book projects was on African jewellery, and ended up being a fashion accessory designer!
Marie-Paule Tano, Founder of Rokus London: I’ve always been passionate about accessories but graduated in politics. My initial designs served as encouragement to pursue an education in jewellery design and manufacturing so that I would be able to understand better why they went wrong and how to modify them.
Safietou Seck, Founder of Sarayaa: I am an economist by training, and I have been looking into doing this for a long time when I was younger. I was in Washington, and I decided to open a store and I was working with different stylists. One day, I thought to myself; ‘you know what, you need to go back home and do this’. So, I went back home, and I didn't do it because I did not have the courage, so I ended up at the American Embassy and I worked there for seven years. I was in Gorée Island, which is an island off the coast of Senegal, and I was wearing a creation of mine and this lady came to me, and she was the assistant of Mrs. Obama. She asked me where I bought the dress. And I told her I made it myself and she told me Mrs. Obama would have loved to have your dress. And that was a trigger for me.
Kerry James, Director of Tsandza: Tsandza means love in isiSwati. It's a name that was chosen by our women artisans. The brand was launched at the end of 2016, but prior to that, the weaving business itself was first established in 1979 by an original founder, who was not me. So, what happened was that I was approached by the founder and their family and was asked if I would like to take on the business. So, my first thought when I was introduced to it was that the rest of the world needs to know about this and then as I delved into it just a little bit more, it became very clear to me that this was an organisation that has the capacity to make a huge difference in the lives of women specifically living here and also to contribute to strengthening the local economy and to demonstrating to the world that ethical production and conscious consumerism can coexist with luxury.
AMAKA: The techniques and innovation used on your designs, please tell us about those and why they form such an integral part of the brand.
Shekudo: It's beautiful being in Nigeria because you're sort of privy to a lot of those different techniques, you know; dyeing techniques, weaving embroidery — all that sort of stuff. With the latest collection, I just wanted to experiment a little bit more with Aso Oke. I did work a lot with glass, recycled glass. I love resin and I want to work with it, but I can't seem to access it here on ground. So, I decided to look for the next best thing and wanted something that's sustainable that we have plenty of and that is leftover glass. I work with a small artisan factory here that creates recycled things from leftover glass so that's where that came from. We also blended some bronze work because I wanted to work with the bronze artisans in Benin City. So, we incorporated that with the glass. Formerly we did silver, local silver. Then with the leather again, we just used local remnant leather.
Adele Dejak: Some of it is normal brass and some of it is recycled. Predominantly, recycled brass is for the cast pieces. We use the West African technique, you just basically melt metals, like the recycled gold knobs. And then you have a piece and when it's cool, you now finish it by buffing and sandpaper. It's quite a long, laborious process. With the other pieces where it doesn't involve casting, it just involves doing a patent, cutting it on the flat plate of metal and shaping it. And then from there once you've got the shape you now do the sand papering, buffing, and polishing and so on.
Rokus London: Some designs were made directly at the bench, experimenting with materials, bending, soldering with only a vague idea in mind. A lot of the time, I would work with Ivorian artisans to create a simple and typical local shape that I then transform as I go. Other designs were inspired by nature, architecture, art pieces or old photos. For the last collection, I wanted to create pieces that featured old Akan filigree style designs and had a very modern and sleek finish. It took a few months and hundreds of sketches to get the essence of the Aura earrings. Whilst all the other pieces we do are 100% made by hand, for this, I used CAD and 3D printing as I wanted a very crisp and sharp finish. What is important in the end for the ROKUS brand is to create objects that are sculptured, unique and timeless.
Sarayaa: It is very artisanal. So, you have somebody who's basically sitting, and he has a wooden kind of machine, and he weaves. You have, for example, lace, and I mix it with handwoven, and that’s the kind of fusion I’m working with. I do not only make handwoven, because it is very heavy, and the continent is very hot. So, it must be a combination of a lot of things because my brand is these three things. We said tradi-modern, meaning a mixture of traditional and modern, you know, styles and fabric. It's high end and for women.
Tsandza: For us, the tradition and culture are incorporated or reflected in our products through weaving, using hands, whether it's weaving grass, or weaving, any fibre is traditionally a very kind of core African skill. Weaving with bamboo and with Mohair is not traditional, per se, but the act of weaving is and then all of our designs are intentionally aiming to reflect the sort of the colour, vibrance and contrast that we experience in Africa on a day-to-day basis.
AMAKA: Sustainability has become quite the term in the fashion industry, and it looks different for each business. While it may be a trend or marketing tool for some, what does it mean and look like for your business?
Shekudo: We had a conference in Paris recently and we sort of said African designers are quite sustainable practices because we do try to use what's leftover. We do try to make use of what's around us. It's difficult to import things and it's expensive. So, we are forced to create innovative, sustainable solutions with what we have. I think a lot of African brands are sustainable by default. All this sort of buzz stuff in the fashion industry now is that brands are trying to come back to sustainability practices. We've been doing it because we have to with the fashion landscape in Africa.
Adele Dejak: For me sustainability means doing your best to help people around you. Sustainable means doing reflection, doing the best to help the environment. There's a lot more than just recycling. Being ethical, things being handmade is kind of becoming more and more complicated. So, I wouldn't have a clear-cut answer for that, but I would just say as far as I'm concerned, I try to be fair in my work.
Rokus London: I would ideally only create one-off pieces, but I understand that collections are more marketable and that means producing the same design several times. What we chose to do is make all our pieces to order, which limits waste. A lot of the steps involved to create our jewellery also involves artisanal production. We’d like to think that it is helping preserve this amazing centuries-old craft that is jewellery making and the artisans that work within it.
Sarayaa: I don't throw away fabric when I have waste, I don't throw it away. I make something out of it because everything is basically handmade.
Tsandza: Our sustainability comes through the natural fibres that we work with which are mohair, which is wool that comes from a and bamboo. Both are natural fibres, and they have less impact on the environment than other mass-produced products. The second way is in the actual production methods, which is all by hand. So, we don't need any electricity whatsoever for our production and even the sewing machines can be run without electricity. Our wood burning stoves even reuse fuel so that we're using as little wood as we can, as we must, and the wood that we do get is typically wood that's lying around on the ground in forests. On top of that, our dyes that we use, the powders are biodegradable. And then finally, even our cooling system in our factory, which is like an 850 square-metre building, is cooled by having a water sprinkler system on the roof that is gravity-fed and doesn't need electricity.