Leading African designers Alphadi (Seidnaly Sidahmed Alphadi) and Miang (Regina Miangue) will grace the annual Kenya Fashion Week slated for June 2-8 in Nairobi. A designer who excels at the event will exhibit at the International Festival of African Fashion (FIMA) on the island of Bourbon in Niger (December 3-8).

Alphadi (centre) showcases his Africa-inspired designs on the catwalk

FIMA, a prestigious fashion event, draws exhibitors from all over the world. Co-director of the Kenya Fashion Week, Sue Wacheke Muraya, says the ministry of trade and industry has endorsed this event with the objective of promoting talent and generating business in the fledgling Kenyan fashion and textile industry. A special fashion show and a gala dinner at Carnivore and Intercontinental Hotel on June 2 and 5, respectively, will set the ball rolling ahead of the three days (June 6-8) of exhibition and fashion shows at Westlands’ Sarit Centre business mall. The event will present aspiring models the opportunity to sign up for modeling courses besides meeting agents who could catapult them to fame.

Designer Paula Amalemba and model Lissa Modistra

Malian Alphadi, Africa’s most famous international award-winning designer, and the Senegal-based Central African Republic designer Miang are expected to share their vast experience with their East African counterparts drawn from Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Born In Timbuktu in 1957 and living and working in Niamey (Niger) and Paris (France), Alphadi’s diverse cultures are reflected in his collections which have featured on the world’s prestigious catwalks in Paris, New York, Washington DC, Tokyo and Quebec. He weaves traditional lines, forms and colours of the Sahara desert people with modern European styles to create his unique style. Both Alphadi and Miang began as self-taught stylists in their childhood before enrolling in fashion schools. While the former trained in the United States and France, the latter attended schools in France and Italy.

Miang, daughter of a former Central African Republic diplomat, got interested in African textiles and assisted in organising fashion shows in Nigeria and Benin in the 1980s while still in secondary school. However it was not until her parents moved to Morocco that the 32-year-old artist started designing garments based on North, Central and West African cultures. She moved to Paris for studies in 1992 and launched her label three years later before returning to Bangui in 1997 and opening a workshop that helped organise shows in her country’s capital. She relocated to Dakar in 1999 from where she designs for famous musicians and thespians and works with Senegalese, Ivorian and French designers. “She not only creates designs that promote and characterise her dream of a united Africa but also help put African designs on the world fashion map,” says Maison Francaise’s programmes coordinator Harsita Waters.

This is the first time foreign designers of international repute are participating in the Kenya Fashion Week, held at Sarit Centre since 2001, in what Maison Francaise’s director Jean-Pierre Volia describes as “the confrontation of artistic experience.” Local designers like Sally Karago (Macensal), Paula Amalemba (PAWS), Lucy Rao (Rialto Fashion), Agatha Otury (Intrinsic Falconry Fashion), and Deepa Singh are some of the 46 designers who have confirmed their participation in the event that will be open to the public between 10 am and 6 pm with fashion shows at 1 pm and 6pm daily. This event is expected to showcase best fashion designs in East Africa and also act as a market where visitors will buy designer clothing, jewellery, bags, shoes, and other accessories. Designers Sue Muraya and Lucy Rao Directors Muraya and Moira Tremaine, like the rest of the designers, appear ignorant of the gains posed by the African Growth Opportunity Act that gives 6400 African goods free access to the American market. They cannot even quantify any economic benefits of the event to Kenya, East Africa and Africa

But how well is the Kenya Fashion Week serving local designers? While Otury says the event has given her focus in her work, Amalemba says she has got contacts, exposure and business from the event. To participate in Kenya Fashion Week, a designer must pay Sh15000 (about US$187.5). This not only discourages designers from taking part since it is beyond the reach of most of them but also gives the event the image of an exclusive members club with 40 participants every year. Designers paid Sh20000 (US$250), Sh17500 (US$218.75) in 2001 and 2002, respectively. In 2001 Otury, for instance, had to pool resources with Amalemba and two other designers to afford a stand. The following year, she says, she and another shared a stand. However this year she says she is paying for herself as the Kenya Fashion Week has brought her business.

Designers Sue Muraya and Lucy Rao

Muraya admits most designers find the participation fee to be expensive “if you look at it in terms of what they are earning.” Saying “we are not focusing on the number of designers but on the growth in terms of production,” Muraya says they have subsidised participation fee to enable many more designers to participate. But designer Elizabeth Sherry Esseri of Zindika Heritage disagrees. “The Kenya Fashion Week is not promoting any one. The only time we hear about it is when it is being launched like now and then it goes quiet until the following year again,” she says. Only one out of every 10 designers in Kenya may be said to depend entirely on art. Others supplement their earnings from other activities. Why do Kenyans not have a national dress-- is it because they ‘love Western garb’? Why haven’t local designers done anything to set the agenda on national dress for the public? Otury says they are using “a forum like the Fashion Week in coming up with such a garment. No ‘African’ or ‘Kenyan’ design has been presented to the public.

You can’t go out looking for something you do not know you lack, do you? It is upon designers to present such a costume to Kenyans.” But just what is ‘Kenyan’ or ‘African’ dress? Both Otury and Muraya say it is that garment that is based on African ‘culture’. Otury says, “My design is influenced by the African culture but I use the Western concept of fashion in order to fit in the global market. Africans who design for the catwalk must make clothes for the international market.” While admitting locally designed clothes may be too expensive to Kenyans in the face of imported second hand clothes (mitumba), Muraya says “Our designs are expensive because we do not produce in mass. More Kenyans should don locally designed clothes to bring down the cost.” Otury concurs.

Miang collection to inspire East African designers

But from what Amalemba says, everything appears to boil down to the size of the pocket and economic pragmatism. Comparing fabrics from Dubai, West Africa and Kenya, local fabrics cost more with those from Dubai being cheaper. “A Dubai fabric costs Sh250 per meter and one needs only two and a half a metre to make a suit whereas the Kenyan fabric costs between Sh350 and Sh450 a metre. One needs twice as much material to make a suit,” she says, explaining that the extra length is for taking care of shrinking; a metre of fabric from Dubai is 60 inches wide compared to Kenya’s 42-45 inches. However, Kenyan fabrics are nicer-looking and longer-lasting compared to the former. A West African fabric measuring five and a half metres retails for between Sh3500 and Sh7000.

Three years down the line, Muraya says Kenya Fashion Week is looking for sponsors to help them set up a production centre for designers so they may concentrate on creativity instead of the technical hustles of garments. In this way they will get buyers enabling them to bring in international buyers. Small-scale entrepreneurs are least favoured by AGOA as US buyers prefer to do business with large-scale producers and suppliers. Although African exports of garments to the United States has shot up over the past two years since the commencement of AGOA, 80 per cent of these exports are made with fabric produced in low wage Asian countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Taiwan, China and India as textile factories close in Africa. Kenya, for example, has had six textile factories closing over the past two years. Employers in the Kenya’s Export Promotion Zone laid off hundreds of workers in fabric and textile factories in early 2003 for protesting poor working conditions (long working hours without leave or overtime compensation, low wages, racism, sexual harassment, among other complaints).

Although EPZ employers claimed they pay each worker US$100 (about Ksh8000), the latter said they were paid an all-inclusive Sh4800 (US$60) per month without any other benefits. When the Government threatened action against any offending businesspeople, seven EPZ employers (six of whom are foreigners) countered by saying they were doing Kenya a favour by creating jobs for its citizens and that they could shift to other countries where their services would be appreciated. They said their businesses had generated more than US$170 million for Kenya in 2002 alone.

Anna Adero, Dzambe Matindi and Paula Amalemba

Among conditions African countries should satisfy to benefit from AGOA include protection of human and worker rights, elimination of child labour and poverty, and protection of intellectual property rights. By dismissing workers, it was felt EPZ factory bosses and the ministry of trade and industry were not living up to the AGOA spirit and that events like the Kenya Fashion Week will always be dragged behind by a government that scores very low on AGOA conditions. Among the major sponsors of the Kenya Fashion Week is the indefatigable Maison Francaise who have a hand in the promotion of almost every cultural and artistic work in Kenya. And Africa.

In fact, speculation abound that the French are using the arts as a smokescreen for their political influence in Africa. They are flying Alphadi into Nairobi. Volia says France has no hidden agenda in its promotion of culture: “France, which upholds cultural diversity even at home, has no hidden agenda in its supports of the arts in Africa or elsewhere. It has always been like this.” Meanwhile Zindika Heritage and Tausi Promotions are set to hold a fashion designers enlightenment conference and workshops in Nairobi (July 31-August 2).

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