Clothes in African cities have long lived extended, social lives. They move through households and communities as objects shaped by memory, identity and use. Our garments accumulate memory through wear; altered as bodies change, remade depending on the occasion, passed between hands, worn and re-worn, because they matter. Within these systems, “slow” is not an imported ethical stance but an indigenous logic embedded in everyday practice, not just articulated as ideology.
Yet this history of care does not exempt African fashion systems from scrutiny. Longevity has always coexisted with excess, and today’s scale demands reevaluation. The same cities that hold deep cultures of reuse now sit at the centre of a growing textile crisis, shaped by the influx of secondhand clothing, population growth and global overproduction.
In Lagos, for instance, this tension is impossible to ignore. Project Irapada, a 2025 research initiative led by Style House Files, mapped the volumes, flows, and circular pathways of textile waste across Lagos State. Their study traced movement from markets and garment production clusters to Olusosun landfill, in collaboration with the Lagos Waste Management Authority. Lagos generates an estimated 21,684 tonnes of textile waste every month, amounting to roughly 260,000 tonnes annually. For context, a single metric tonne is roughly the weight of a small car.
These findings are sobering. At this scale, textile waste moves through the city as a constant, accumulating presence. While systems of repair and reuse remain active, the data shows they are increasingly strained by scale, and tailors, markets and secondhand traders are being pushed well beyond their limits, absorbing volumes never designed for circulation or care.
Similar pressures are surfacing across the continent. In Accra, Ghana, the Kantamanto market absorbs vast quantities of secondhand clothing from the Global North, sorting, reselling, and discarding what cannot be used, with overflow spilling into landfills and waterways. In Nairobi, Kenya, textiles now make up a growing share of landfill waste, with figures from the National Environment Management Authority showing fabric waste at Dandora nearly tripling over the past five years. In South Africa, fast fashion consumption and limited textile recycling infrastructure have intensified landfill dependency, despite a long history of thrift, alteration and reuse. Across North, East, West and Southern Africa, long-standing systems of care are being asked to carry the weight of global overproduction.
The question, then, is no longer whether sustainability sits at the core of African fashion. That much is evident. The more urgent inquiry asks who is extending this logic further in the present, materially and structurally, beyond rhetoric.
In 2025, a growing number of African designers responded with substance. Through unconventional materials, localized supply chains, and experimental approaches to circularity, they began to outline what the next stage of African fashion sustainability could look like in practice.
Material as Method: Brands Redefining the Next Stage
Some of the most compelling work of 2025 approached different ways of thinking. One clear example was Rituals of Labour, a collaboration between This Is Us NG and Iamisigo. Their 2025 collection centred the act of making itself, drawing attention to the work usually folded into the background of fashion. The process was left visible. Hands, materials, and methods were treated as part of the garment rather than something to smooth over. In Rituals of Labour, work is framed as cultural and communal rather than purely productive, and this sensibility runs through the collection. The pieces were constructed from patchworked textiles in indigo, turmeric, rust and plaid. Fabrics were hand-dyed, cut, and assembled into square and elongated panels, allowing the structure of the garment to remain legible. You could see how one section met another, how the clothes held themselves together.
In Senegal, SOKOLATA, led by Sikoti Mbaitjongue, demonstrated a different but equally rigorous approach through their minimalist designs. For its 2025 IMOBROWN collection, marking the brand’s third year, everything began with organic Senegalese cotton. Handwoven yarns were dyed by hand, with every stage of production, from sourcing and weaving to dyeing and finishing, kept within regional networks. Their work sat in the insistence of framing sustainability as material control and economic self-determination, staying close to source, labour and material.
Meanwhile in Kenya, Maisha By Nisria offered one of the clearest articulations of zero-waste design in practice through upcycling. Based in Gilgil, the studio works exclusively with discarded textiles pulled from flea markets, wholesalers and landfills. Rather than treating waste as a constraint, Maisha By Nisria treats it as a starting point, producing jackets, skirts, and layered outfits that reject virgin fabric entirely. Nothing feels scarce in their outcome, even though nothing new was introduced, and circularity is embedded at the foundation of their designs, rather than just retrofitted after the fact.
Another personal favorite was at Lagos Fashion Week 2025, where Nigerian label Eki Kere showcased their “Usóró Ndō" collection, inspired by Annang traditional marriage. Working with raffia, cardboard, linen, and plant dyes drawn from indigo and kola nut, founder Abasiekeme Ukanireh rooted the work in substances that already exist in everyday life. As always, Eki Kere points toward a fashion practice grounded in materials that can return to the earth, while holding conceptual clarity, cultural specificity and visual intention.
A New Material Grammar
Across these practices, a shared material sensibility comes into view. Designers are working with what is already around them, treating waste, local fibres and byproducts as points of departure rather than compromise. Upcycling becomes recomposition. Synthetic excess is pulled back into legible textile languages. Biodegradable materials are used with an awareness of how garments begin, move through use, and eventually leave circulation. Production stays close, held by regional networks of sourcing, making and finishing.
At every scale, from clothing to accessories, materials are allowed to keep their histories intact. Value is shaped through process, use and continuity, not novelty or external benchmarks. What feels newly visible in 2025 is not sustainability itself, but the pressure placed on long-standing systems of care, repair and material knowledge.
These designer-led responses, however, operate within a much larger landscape of excess. While materially rigorous and conceptually grounded, they address only a fraction of the ongoing volume moving through African cities. Slow fashion and experimental material practices function less as solutions proportionate to the crisis, and more as early interventions or signals of how fashion might be restructured.
The work ahead is not to rediscover slow fashion. It is to build the conditions that allow these practices to hold under volume, speed and demand. That scale will not come from designers alone, but from the infrastructures around them: city-level textile recovery systems, policy incentives that reward reuse, producer responsibility frameworks, and investment in industrial repair and recycling. It will require partnerships that extend beyond studios, linking designers to markets, waste authorities and material processors.
Slow has always been here. The work now is ensuring it can survive the volume of the present.
