African Fashion Research Institute

The African Fashion Research Institute was founded in 2019, largely shaped by what we consider to be the urgent and overdue need to remember, rethink, and rewrite fashion histories that speak to afro-centric ways of wearing, knowing, making, and styling often absent in fashion books, exhibitions, and imaginations. The African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) shares the work of local and global African fashion pioneers, academics, makers, thinkers, students, critics and leaders through fashion-driven decolonial research projects and digital platforms. We aim to create new networks of knowledge generation and exchange with online and shareable materials for outreach, curricula development and general public interest. Partnerships and collaborations are at the forefront of building our community, with African fashion studies leading the way to rethink and reframe fashion aesthetics and practices emerging on, and from the continent and its diaspora. Together, we showcase cultural and creative knowledges, archive unique, diverse, alternate identity narratives, and sustain new design narratives.