A MAG is a Modern African Girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things which may interest a MAG.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Doré Fasolati, this week's subjects: Cheerful weekend, Death of fast fashion, Or rebirth, Ghanaian Artists hit the road, Travel, again.

Cheerful weekend A number of fashion events got people intrigued, disappointed, and fascinated and the fashion industry experienced loads of showcases and events. My fav of them all was fashion designer Boye Doe’s official launch of the Wabi Sabi ethical elegant spring-summer 23 collections. It boldly celebrates the transient, impermanent and imperfect nature of life. This event was organized by Debonair Afrik events and held at the Tunnel lounge Airport Residential…. The event featured our beautiful young talented songstress Cina Soul who wore a two-piece from the Wabi Sabi collection and sang her melodious soul to appease the audience. Check out the collection on Instagram @boye_doe or www.boyedoe.com.

This year’s Accra fashion week featured quite a number of local and foreign designers who graced us with their magnificent works of Art designs. I went from seeing our models to regular people and physically challenged people. This is indeed a new era for fashion…..

Death of fast fashion, Or rebirth?

Many have predicted for years the death of fast fashion. Cheap clothing, yearly responsible for billions of tons of carbon emissions and landfill waste, was too damaging and too unethical to continue, they argued.

So fast-fashion giants like H&M and Zara started publishing sustainability reports and information on the environmental impacts of their clothes. Most people shot plenty of holes in those reports, and we are not really interested anyway, we just want to look good and special and different and happy. But ethical, planet-friendly startups such as Pangaia and AllBirds indeed grew in popularity. The youth were thrifting, with the secondhand-clothing industry predicted to outpace fast fashion by 2030.

That all looks rather irrelevant with Shein raising a few more billions and now being valued at $100 billion +, as valuable as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and worth more than H&M and Zara combined.

Surprised? Whatever you make of the quality and designs of their clothes and accessories, Shein has turned fast fashion into real-time retail. While Zara revolutionized the industry in the 2000s by narrowing clothing’s lead time from design to store to a matter of weeks, Shein can do that in days. Even more unique is how it has combined a super-fast supply chain with blisteringly quick market research and customer acquisition.

Just look at its vast social media presence. Shein finds its Gen-Z target demographic where they spend a lot of their time — on TikTok. When comparing “haul” videos — where young shoppers show off their latest purchases — #sheinhaul dominates, with twice as many views as #zarahaul.

Ghanaian Artists hit the road.

Ghana keeps hitting the news, not only with football (yes, we did not reach the finals but billions saw us play and checked where and what is Ghana) but also with fashion and art.

35 years old Tamale artist Ibraham Mahama has a solo exhibition in the prestigious 3000 mtr square “Oude Kerk” (Old Church) in Amsterdam, of all places, where he puts anything, from statues to drawings to torn paper to relate the present with the past and links Elmina castle Dutch tombstones with those in this Amsterdam church. He calls it scars. A big feat, for any artist. Ibrahim made noise in Ghana by covering several buildings with jute sacks and in 2014 he had his first solo exhibition outside, in Dublin, Ireland. Since then he has exhibited in the USA, the UK, and now the Netherlands. In Tamale, he made noise by buying and parking a number of old airplanes and turning them into a community learning center.

And then there is 39-year-old Foster Sakyiamah, a painter who hides everything between flowing lines and who is mentioned in the December issue of KLM's inflight magazine “Holland Herald”. He can fly business class, his paintings are selling for 50,000 $ upwards now.

Which just goes to say that Ghana has a lot to offer to the international art world

Travel, again

As mentioned earlier, your suitcase may not arrive as planned. So make sure your medication, if any, is with you, and carry the prescription, in case customs has a problem with it or you may need more. Most countries are lots stricter than Ghana and demand prescriptions for anything.

Lydia...

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