Design Indaba: Celebrating Colour
Fashion Rising's Spring 2014 collection celebrates Africa's bold, bright and brilliant colours.
Fashion Rising Spring 2014 collection.
Fashion Rising’s Spring 2014 collection celebrates vibrant colours, artisanal craftsmanship and the beauty of golden rays on warm sunny days.
Studio One Eighty Nine, a social enterprise dedicated to promoting and curating African and African-inspired content through various media and cultural projects, launched Fashion Rising. The studio regard their launch of Fashion Rising as a contribution to V-Day’s One Billion Rising’s campaign that hopes to end violence against women and girls. The fashion brand empowers women by building sustainable fashion and artisanal business.
Each garment in the Spring 2014 collection is entirely handmade by artisans in Ghana. The range celebrates brilliant colour using hand-batiked fabrics, which employs a method of dyeing a fabric by which the parts of the fabric not intended to be dyed are covered with removable wax. The collection is finished off with a carefully thought-out series of accessories in vegan leather, cotton and cotton-and-canvas.
In all designs, Fashion Rising infuses traditional techniques such as basket making, kente weaving and “bogolanfini” (a Malian weaving and dying technique for textiles) with innovative concepts to develop products that preserve heritage and tradition but are at the same time modern and contemporary.
At Design Indaba Expo’s exhibition Africa is Now, Fashion Rising’s green Aggie shirt and jacket and batik-printed green Ralph shorts were displayed under the exhibition’s “Africa is Sharp” theme, which aimed to show off the bright colours and rich patterns that are seen throughout the continent.