History of the Kaba and design inspiration

I was born and bred in Cameroon, central Africa and I grew up wearing European clothes sewn by my mother and I’ve seen around in the city I grew up in Duala and Kribi people wearing traditional clothing. Different part of the country have different fabric. There is a traditional dress called kaba. The history of the kaba was instigated by the missionaries that came to Cameroon. The wives noticed that the young girl and women were topless. So they cut a piece of fabric and threw it on the girls and said ‘cover’ and so throughout the years it turned out to be kaba. And the Kaba is a rich garment, the silhouette is amazing the hem is massive. So moving from there as a contemporary fashion designer, I believe that this is another step to take the Kaba, not only to use them with cotton, maybe move into a little bit of silk, add embroidery and change and twist to put it into a contemporary setting where everyone can wear.

I consider myself a fashion designer from Africa not an African fashion designer. Traditionally as African designer you think that you’re expected to bring African print, African weight, African shape, a lot of colours. If you don’t then you’re not gonna be considered as an African designer. And I think that either that you use the fabric as a whole and make a rich design or you take other elements to create fashion that have reference to Africa but can be worn by anyone.

I graduated as a fashion and textile designer and I have to say I had a slightly tricky experience. As someone coming from Africa it was a little bit confusing for the tutors why I wasn’t using colours and pattern and African fabric and textile and the reason is that there’s plenty of colours out there if people want to wear colours and there’s lot of designers doing things with the African textile. I needed to bring something new, so that’s my approach as a designer .

We’ve seen African textile develop globally, in the fashion field we have stella McCartney, she’s using the African textiles and we’ve seen it again and again but now we need, as fashion designer coming from Africa, to try to add something more into it. I think that we can change the direction of conversation and start introducing new way of presenting African fashion. That is where my inspiration and my creativity is focussed to create my collection and everything else.

Design inspiration

Speaking of African fashion designers that are from Africa, I have the example of Duro Olowu who is my inspiration as well. He’s amazing, He fully uses African textile because his garments have so much print and it just makes everything look very expensive and very authentic and very elegant. So I think that is what fashion designers who are from Africa can maybe start a conversation and carry on and create things that are more informative and more representative of Africa in a larger sense.