The Fold is a seven-week online, synchronous course structured around The Fold as materiality, conceptual metaphor and creative project, supported by an exchange of readings, dialogues and creative exchanges.
The course draws on key debates and hosts a collective exploration of (k)new knowledge(s), afro-sustainable practices, and ways of coming to know African fashion histories and futures.
It responds to a demand by designers, artists, academics and decolonial thinkers seeking spaces and ways to develop new discourses for and with African fashion.
Please register for the cohort starting in May 2026.
See link in bio
What are we hoping to achieve with this course?
With The Fold Online Course, AFRI is creating a space for research, exchange, and reimagining African fashion beyond aesthetics; as culture, knowledge, and archive.
We’re asking: what do we collect, preserve, and share? And how can we build new futures through collaboration and indigenous knowledge?
Join a growing network of creatives shaping African fashion on its own terms.
Sign up using the link in our bio!
In partnership with AFRI and Wanted, the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography facilitated the Writer-in-Residence programme, bringing together emerging creatives across fashion, photography, fine art, and literature to engage deeply with Fashion_The Image.
Through research, mentorship, and access to the exhibition’s public programme, participants explored the role of African fashion photography in shaping culture and visual narratives.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing their essays, perspectives, and creative processes.
Read more at the link in bio
From left to right: Melusi Masike, Anele Turdon, Danijela Cook, Warona Motshele, Erica de Greef, Michelle-Erin Sibiya. Zinhle Khumalo, Timna Ngowapi, Bella Makhubo and Anele Nyanda
The Fold Online Course invites you to explore Afrocentric fashion narratives through folds, pleats, wrapping, and drapery.
These textile techniques have been integral to civilizations across the continent throughout history.
Join us on a journey of discovery, featuring critical readings, expert presentations, and live discussions.
Limited spaces available!
Follow the link in our bio to learn more and book your spot.
Image Credits:
* African Fashion Research Institute
* Photographer: Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (Austria, 1897 – 1953)
The last “Lesela as Calico” Pattern making Workshop in Kampala, Uganda unfortunately comes to an end this weekend.
We end off our three part session facilitated over the last three months with experimentation on indigenous textiles from the region such as barkcloth.
Please feel free to join us as we bring this round of workshops to an end.
Pattern Magic II is curated as part of the AFRI-Lab Workshop Series and is supported by The Bold Woman Fund, an initiative of @boldinafrica and the British Council @eastafricaarts as part of its Creative DNA Programme 2026.
In preparation for Fashion_The Image, the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography partnered with the African Fashion Research Institute to shape the exhibition’s identity through a critical discourse. This curatorial collaboration included writer, curator and AFRI co-founder Dr Erica de Greef, a core researcher and co-curator of the exhibitions Koto Bolofo retrospective.
In her essay "Fashion Images Matter," she argues that fashion imagery is never neutral, as it carries histories, power, and perspective that shape how identity and culture are understood. She calls for more critical, locally grounded readings and new visual languages that reflect lived realities.
Read the blog to explore why fashion images matter, and what is at stake in how they are made, seen and remembered.
Link in Bio
As we gear up for the second of our three-part “Lesela as Calico” Patternmaking Workshop in Kampala, Uganda we thought to share a few images from our last two sessions with our first cohort.
So far, we have learned how to make and work with DIY plastic mannequins, challenged what we thought we knew through drafting Bunka basic sloper blocks for the first time and engaged in collaborative problem solving.
We continue with feedback sessions this week, explore Pattern Magic II written by Tomoko Nakamichi further and reflect on the importance of how workshops such as these can contribute towards reparative research in indigenous textile and craft knowledge(s) from the African continents long past.
Pattern Magic II is curated as part of the AFRI-Lab Workshop Series and is supported by The Bold Woman Fund, an initiative of @boldinafrica and the British Council @eastafricaarts as part of its Creative DNA Programme 2026.
Fashion_The Image
Fashion images matter. They shape how fashion is known, remembered, encountered and imagined. Fashion photography promises truth, yet it moves in fictional ways. Its images become the archive that carries the grammars of fashion across time.
This exhibition considers the fashion photograph as a site of knowledge and futurity. While some images fade from view, others endure, becoming iconic markers of style, innovation and cultural memory.
Rather than dismiss these images as fleeting, the works gathered here invite attention to the futures that they bring into view. The photographs render identities, sensibilities, desires, intimacies and pride visible, and help imagine and shape our afrocentric visual landscapes.
Drawing on art, vernacular portraiture and collaboration, these images emerge through an expressive choreography of designers, photographers, stylists, models, and many others. Together, they reveal fashion photography as a dynamic, evolving form that crafts future histories.
Fashion_The Image will open to the public on February 28 and will run until May 30 at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.
See link in bio for more information.
Image:
Title: Utopia
Date: March 2023
Photographer: Tatenda Chidora @tatendachidora
Designer: Nao Serati @neoseratimofammere
#Fashion_TheImage
Lesela as Calico Workshop Series are part of AFRI’s ongoing effort to move decolonial theory into practice. Referencing the Sesotho and Swahili word for cloth, the Lesela as Calico workshop Series centre indigenous African textiles as sites of innovation, challenging colonial perceptions of material, value, process work and design. Our patternmaking workshops are curated as a periodical – a three-part in real life series facilitated over three months – taking place on the last Saturday of every month.
African systems of communication and knowledge production extend beyond written formats. Practices such as Okukomaga show how knowledge is passed down through oral histories, embodied practice, and time. Recognising that learning through reading alone is inherently colonial, this workshop rethinks the book review whilst simultaneously critiquing fashion education's prevalence of coloniality: in the implied ‘universality’ of Western taste and aesthetics, the standardising of sizing, the labelling of body types, and the engineering of clothing through the metric pattern system. As such we look to alternative sewing pattern publications and approaches to making clothing with Pattern Magic II written by Tomoko Nakamichi as our first publication being reviewed over the next three months.
Led by Lesiba Mabitsela of @lesibamabitselastudio , alongside Uganda fashion designer and artist, Mwami Murungi of @afro_muru , the workshop will be a collective, hands-on process and invites participants from fashion, visual arts and architecture to think and create with their hands and engage with alternative pattern drafting methods, contributing to the development of a decolonised African clothing aesthetic.
This intimate engagement only has space for 10 participants so sign up!
Fill out the form to secure your spot (Link in bio).
Introductory Session: 18 February 2026
Online Meeting via Zoom
18h00-20h00 EAT
Session 1: 28 February 2026
Xenson Art Space, Kamwokya, Kampala
11:00–17:00 EAT
PatternMagic II is curated as part of AFRI-Lab's Lesela as Calico Workshop Series and is supported by @boldinafrica and the British Council as part of its Creative DNA Programme 2026.
BEHIND-THE-PATTERN Episode 3: Beyond Convulsion: Fashion, Memory and the Possibilities of the Archive
The final Behind-the-Pattern dialogue brings Scott Williams into conversation with Bongani Tau for a reflective exchange on education, fashion and African knowledge-making beyond inherited institutional frames.
Drawing on their shared work within New Patterns — from the Mapungubwe Prototype Group to township-based research in Daveyton — the conversation asks what becomes possible when lived experience is treated not as supplementary material, but as archive.
Moving between South African and European teaching contexts, Bongani reflects on the limits of formal education systems and the necessity of non-formal, relational pedagogies that allow curiosity, vulnerability and local intelligence to surface. Fashion emerges here not as trend or industry, but as a technology of memory — holding survival, dignity and futurity at once.
Engaging Achille Mbembe’s notion of the colonial subject held in convulsion, the dialogue turns toward questions of recovery, reversal and abundance. Rather than seeking to discover African archives, this episode insists they already exist — in people, materials, sound, garments and everyday practices — and asks how they might be held, documented and circulated with care.
Closing the series, this conversation positions the New Patterns workbooks not as authoritative texts, but as invitations: tools for decentralised learning, ethical pedagogy and archives already in motion.
🎬 Premieres Friday 19 December at 12pm on YouTube
🔗 Link in bio
Archival & Image Credits
Standerton Workshop photographs by Thamsanqa Minga, courtesy of MINGAATWORK (Pty) Ltd.
Archival Footage:
Mapungubwe Prototype Work Group (AFRI, 2024), part of New Patterns — Closing the Fold.
Community Archive Reference:
Project 1520 / Made in Daveyton, founded by Bongani Tau
@daveyton1520 | www.madeindaveyton.co.za
New Patterns — Closing the Fold is supported by the National Arts Council and presented by the African Fashion Research Institute.
#BehindThePattern #NewPatterns #AfricanArchives #DecolonialPedagogy #FashionAsMemory #AFRIDigital #KnowledgeInMotion
BEHIND-THE-PATTERN — Episode 2
Tracing Lineages: Punk, Barkcloth and Creative Re-imaginings in New Patterns
Premiers 17 December 2025 at 12pm
Behind-the-Pattern continues with a conversation between Lesiba Mabitsela and Lerato Shemi, exploring how New Patterns unfolded through cross-continental exchange, creative experimentation and barkcloth practice.
This episode traces how Lerato — then a student at DUT — encountered barkcloth for the first time during the Pan-African Research Residency (PARR) workshop in Durban, and how that experience reshaped her understanding of material, memory and design.
Lesiba reflects on the wider ambitions of the residency: circulation of African knowledge, collaborative learning, and the kinds of pedagogical “lifting” required to sustain cross-border creative work.
Premiers Wednesday 17 December at 12pm on YouTube.
Subscribe, set a reminder, and join the dialogue.
🔗 Link in bio
Archival Materials & Images
1. Wrap Me in My History (2023), filmed and edited by Bongani Tau for AFRI’s Pan African Research Residency (PARR), Durban workshop facilitated by Sheila Nakitende & Liz Kobusinge
2. Barkcloth harvesting (okukuuma/okugumika) and stretching footage, filmed by Bongani Tau in Masaka, Uganda during PARR 2024
3. Ngozi Family Nizakupanga Ngozi (1975) — Zamrock reference for educational commentary (fair use)
4. @guzangs archive image (Instagram, sourced 2023) for contextual reference in conversation about Zambian craft and heritage
Episode Readings
Edward P. Mintz – Zamrock: The Heavy Rock Scene in 1970s Zambia
Walter Mignolo – Local Histories / Global Designs
#BehindThePattern #NewPatterns #DecolonialFashion #AfricanMaterialCultures #AFRIDigital
New Patterns Workbook #1: Fashioning Histories is not a textbook
But a site of activation.
Developed through workshops, field research and collective experimentation, the workbook offers a practice-led approach to fashion education that begins with people, objects, memory and place. Participants are invited to work with photographs, sound, material fragments and personal histories — not as references to be decoded, but as archives already in motion.
Rather than delivering fixed content, the workbook creates conditions for reflection, making and circulation. It supports facilitators, students and collectives to adapt activities to their own contexts, while remaining accountable to the communities, materials and histories that shape the work.
Designed for workshops, classrooms, collectives and self-led study, the workbook encourages flexible use, local translation and ethical citation.
To learn more about the New Patterns workbooks or to enquire about access and future activations, google form 🔗 in bio
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New Patterns Team
Workbook / project graphic design: Nontokozo Tshabalala
Project coordination: Ziyander Mute
Website development: Dumisani Jere
New Patterns — Closing the Fold
Supported by the National Arts Council
Presented by the African Fashion Research Institute
#NewPatterns #AFRILegacy #PatterningFutures #PatternsOfKnowing #DecolonialFashion #AFRIDigital #FashionEducation
