Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi, this week's subjects: The Unforgettable Fashion Moments of 2024, Origins of Ghana's Fashions, and Frankies and Hot Dogs

The Unforgettable Fashion Moments of 2024. Tech Couture: The Future is Now. The intersection of technology and fashion reached new heights last year. Designers embraced wearable tech like never before, integrating smart fabrics and augmented reality into their collections. Balenciaga's innovative designs featured clothing that could change colours or patterns at the touch of a button. Fashion shows began to incorporate immersive experiences, with virtual reality transporting audiences into entirely new worlds, blurring the lines between digital and physical fashion. Smart Fabrics: Clothing equipped with smart technology such as moisture-wicking, temperature-regulating, or even health-monitoring fabrics gained traction, merging functionality with fashion. The Return of Y2K Aesthetics: Nostalgia continued to reign supreme in 2024, with the revival of early 2000's fashion capturing the hearts of many. Bubblegum pink, baggy jeans and crop tops were everywhere, thanks to fashion icons like Dua Lipa and the resurgence of brands like Diesel and Ed Hardy. Social media challenges celebrating this era highlighted playful, kitschy aesthetics, reminding us that fashion is often cyclical. Vintage and Retro Influences: Nostalgia-driven designs, including vintage athletic logos and retro styles from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, continued to influence contemporary fashion. Gender Fluidity in Fashion: 2024 marked a further shift towards gender-fluid fashion, with numerous brands releasing unisex collections that challenged traditional gender norms. Major fashion houses like Gucci and JW Anderson led the change, showcasing designs seamlessly blending masculine and feminine elements. This movement was not just about clothing but also about redefining identity, challenging societal norms, and promoting self-expression through personal style.

Origins of Ghana's fashions. One of the most notable of Ghana's local fashions is the kaba, a garment created from six yards of fabric that includes a tailored blouse, a sewn or wrapped skirt, and an additional piece of fabric for a wrapper or shawl, dating back to at least 1831, and still relevant today. Its origin is foreign-influenced. This was followed by kabas sewn out of kente, thus combining foreign and local, first documented in pictures taken during the opening of the Ambassador Hotel in 1957 (Mövenpick Hotel since 2011). Kente by that time had taken a political colour, linked to the desire for independence from Colonial Britain since about 1950, expressing Ghana's own identity. Next came the Jaguar, about 1953, one of the many possible variations on the kaba, comprising a wrapped skirt and a matching peplum blouse, strong evidence that Ghanaians were highly attuned to the rapidly changing styles of specifically Ghanaian attire. Whereas the wrapped skirt was relatively simplistic, the blouse featured a variety of innovations, including a scalloped v-neck line, scalloped sleeves, and a dramatic, exaggerated ruffle along the bottom of the blouse. These stylistic elements resulted in an ensemble that exposed the upper chest and back while creating an exuberant hemline that exaggerated and drew attention to the wearer's hips.

Frankies and hot dogs. Frankies (Oxford Street, Osu, Accra) is a nice choice if you want a bite and a view of Oxford Street (though the window seats are mostly occupied). You can have pizzas, jollof, burgers, steaks and so forth, or you can order cakes or ice cream, or even rent a room ($77 per night). Parking is hell, but a bit further down is Osu Mall with Shoprite and other shops (Viva Boutique, Hakim Jewelart, Sony Centre, Electromart) and a large underground parking, and then you just walk back, no questions asked. I had a hot dog which to me is a little elongated, warm grilled white bread bun of about 6-7 inches (15-17 cm) long, a thin grilled sausage and some diced onion, mustard and tomato ketchup. But this one was a monster, a real hot bulldog monster about 10 inches long, (25 cm), looking like an open volcano overflowing with a red warm tomato ketchup/ tomato paste mixture, laying on a slice of melted pizza cheese (the fast food type, not the fromaggio you get on your pizza in a real Italian restaurant), some onions, a trace of mustard and I could even find the sausage. The bun was cold. They had definitely not tried to save on the ingredients, but the result was miles away from a traditional hot dog. I think Frankies is owned by people who for religious reasons don't eat sausage or meat, sausages mostly contain meat, pork meat. So they may never have experienced a real hot dog. Which is a quality grilled Wiener sausage, a thin parboiled sausage made of pork and beef in a casing of sheep's intestine, then given a low-temperature smoking, a lightly grilled bread bun slightly shorter than the sausage so that the sausage sticks out on both sides and then some diced onions, mustard and tomato ketchup. Some add coleslaw or capers. Simple, a tasty smoked sausage packed in grilled bread with some sauces on it for extra flavour. But then again, it’s a free world and people add whatever they want and can call it a Brazilian hot dog, or a Chicago, Danish, Dominican, or New Yorker hot dog, so maybe what I had was a Ghanaian hot dog and Frankies is leading the pack?

Lydia...

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