Re-Defining Fashion Cities: African Fashion Designers Between Local and Global Networks

Studying and defining fashion cities has so far shied away from discussing the unbalanced, predefined, and top-down template that the Global North’s leading fashion capitals impose on the Global South’s emerging fashion cities. Focusing on fashion designers in two emerging African fashion hubs, Nairobi and Lagos, this article builds on calls for decolonizing fashion studies and extends this call to the global cartography of fashion and its capitals. It proposes to center our understanding of fashion cities on the role that fashion designers play in urban, national, international, and global networks. In the case of Nairobi and Lagos, we find that designers adopt a range of strategies—blending, upgrading, and brokering—to enable them to navigate across those networks at multiple scales, without losing the value of the local urban context. We note that their work contributes to redefinition of fashion cities “from below,” where value is created and determined outside Global North-led production networks. Their work and strategies also reveal an agenda for African fashion to not follow the established practices of Global North firms in relation to exploitation and fast fashion but to engage more strongly with sustainable development.