and African diaspora fashion. “There was a swelling of
creativity that had always been there.”
In 1957 the revolutionary first prime minister of
Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, declared his country free
from colonial rule. For the occasion he shed his Savile
Row suit in favour of kente cloth — a traditional hand-
woven fabric historically worn by Ashanti royalty. In
doing so he implied that Ghana was entering a new
era, one in which African heritage would be embraced
over western values. “We are going to demonstrate to
the world [...] that we are prepared to lay our founda-
tion,” he proclaimed. “Our own African personality.”
This sense of looking back to go forward is threaded
throughout the exhibition. A highlight is the Vanguard
section, dedicated to designers from this era. Chris
Seydou, Kofi Ansah, Alphadi and Naima Bennis were
the first generation of African designers to gain recog-
nition around the world. Seydou worked for designers
including Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne before
returning to Mali in 1990, while the Ghanaian designer
Ansah made headlines in the late 1970s when, on grad-
uating from Chelsea School of Art, he made a beaded
top for Princess Anne. Alphadi founded the Interna-
tional Festival of African Fashion in 1998, which
brought designers on the continent together with the
likes of Kenzo and Jean Paul Gaultier. Meanwhile,A-listers (Issa Rae, Miley Cyrus and Rihanna among
them). There is Laduma Ngxokolo, whose brand
MaXhosa snagged the Vogue Italia Scouting for Africa
prize in 2014. And also Adeju Thompson, whose
genderless label Lagos Space Programme takes adire
(a type of indigo resist-dyed cotton cloth common in
the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria) and places it
in the new context of knitwear.
The showstopper comes from the label Maison
ArtC, by the Marrakesh-based designer Artsi Ifrach:
Culture Games is a billowing, Moroccan-style selham
cloak and face covering embroidered with the
protective symbols of the hamsa hand and the karana
mudra hand gesture. Inspired by the British trench
coat, Islamic burqa and African masks, the piece is “a
homage to [the exhibition’s] collaboration between
Africa and England”, Ifrach says.
As Africa is the continent with the youngest popula-
tion in the world (60 per cent are under 25), it makes
sense that designers such as Thompson are spear-
heading a modern renaissance akin to the one in the
immediate post-colonial years. “When I was asked to
work on the exhibition, I knew the story had to be
about agency and unbounded creativity. What better
place to start than those liberation years,” says Chris-
tine Checinska, the V&A’s inaugural curator of AfricanThis picture Imane Ayissi’s autumn/winter
2019 show in Paris. Left Culture Games, designed
by Maison ArtC, Morocco, 2021. Below Louis
Vuitton menswear, autumn/winter 202126 • The Sunday Times Style