Showing posts with label Clothing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clothing. Show all posts
Friday, July 20, 2012

Ethical fashion now in Africa

9:01 AM | Posted by African Fashions | | Edit Post

Some term it as Eco-fashion, while others call it Ethical fashion, whichever way, the main point is that they talk about the social and environmental conscious fashion.

In 2000, a report was released that the world’s consumers spent 1 trillion dollars buying clothing outfits. This shows that fashion world has some power on the economic, political, social and environmental sectors. Though eco-fashion industry in Africa is still in its infancy, it will be great to see more of the African fashion manufacturers and designers start using sustainable processes and materials. We might go a level higher an overlook the issue and say- clothing is clothing and fashion is fashion, but is there ay difference? Maybe when you realize that the beautiful bag you bought recently was made after an animal was streamed alive, you will understand things better. Ethical fashion is one way of the many we (consumers) can use in reducing poverty while improving the environment and make world a better and safer place.

Ethical fashion-definition


According to EFF-ethical fashion forum, ethical fashion describes the design, retail, production and retailing of items. It covers range of issues such as pay and working conditions, sustainable production, fair trade, environment and animal welfare and such. Ethical fashion in Africa is aiming to address various problems such as environmental damage, animal cruelty, waste, exploitative forced labor, use of dangerous chemicals. In a bit to make consumers updates of how such outfits are produced, manufacturing partners through ethical brands such as ASOS Africa and SOKO Kenya offers traceability and transparency.

An eye on Africa


From research, mostly from the international brands that make use of plethora of raw resources we have in the fashion scene, you should realize that most African designers don’t use these raw materials, and instead prefers buying, cutting and sewing the materials.

More ethical industrialists and designers have recognized that organic cotton can be used as a sustainable alternative. Organic cotton helps in cutting cost, eliminating need for harmful and expensive chemicals and demand for higher price which in addition helps in reducing poverty. Scualternatives can be tapped to get more ethical African fashion practices.

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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Old African Clothing

12:00 AM | Posted by African Fashions | | Edit Post
Africa is a large continent with several countries. It is not surprising if there are a lot of ways of clothing in each area.  This page covers a lot of time of African fashion style from the stone age to themiddle ages. You can see the differences of African clothing by the time. People who live in Africa have started wearing clothes around 180.000 years ago. African people probably started because there was an ice age that time. First clothing of Africans was made from animal skins, fur or leather as their shawl and loinclothes.
After thousands of years, people in Africa began to make lighter, less sweaty kinds of clothes. Perhaps the first kind of cloth that Africans made was pounded bark fibers. The African peel the bark of some trees and pound them with a stone until they get the soft fibers and the hard part breaks off. Those small pieces of cloth can be pounded or sewn together . In Central Africa especially in Uganda, people usually used the bark of fig trees. People also pounded cloth from raffia palm.
Peopl in Africa dyed the bark cloth to create the trends of patterns. The most famous and important dye was indigo, which is the dye we may see today to make a blue jeans . African usually wore tie dyeing to make patterns on their cloth. In some areas in Africa, women did the fabric work, and the other areas, men did most of fabric work. By 200 BC, some of African people started wearing clothes instead of pounding them because there were so many people now that was not enough bark for everyone. Although there were just a few people started to wear clothes, but soon, a lot of North African people made the clothes as an experts and professionals.
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