African designers

Born in Kinshasa and self-taught, Alvin Junior Mak left the Congo at eleven and built his practice in Paris under the name JmakxParis. His work belongs to a lineage that Kinshasa knows intimately: the suit as a language, cut as a statement of self.

For the 2026 World Cup — the Democratic Republic of Congo's first in more than fifty years — he dressed the twenty-six players of the national team in the “Dark Moniama” wardrobe: black tailored suits, a silver leopard brooch at the lapel, a star-shaped bag. The images of the squad arriving in Houston travelled the world before a single match was played. He had already signed the team's wardrobe for AFCON 2025.

What interests us is not the spectacle but the method. A national wardrobe is a piece of soft power: it decides, in one silhouette, how a country is read. Mak answers with restraint — black wool, a single emblem, a recognisable line — and lets the wearer carry the rest. It is the elegance of the Sape, disciplined into contemporary tailoring.

A national wardrobe decides, in one silhouette, how a country is read.

Read elsewhere · GQ France · BBC Afrique

Amaka Osakwe founded Maki Oh in Lagos and made adire — the Yoruba resist-dye tradition — the grammar of a contemporary wardrobe. The cloth is dyed by hand; the pattern is never twice the same; the garment is cut so the textile, not the silhouette, does the talking.

Her collections read as arguments about womanhood: intimacy, restraint, provocation held just below the surface. She has shown internationally and dressed a global audience without ever detaching the work from the dye yards and hands that make it possible.

Placed next to Kinshasa, Lagos gives the page its second voice. Two countries, two disciplines, two relationships to material and to the international stage. Not one African aesthetic — countless creative languages, each on its own terms.

Africa does not have one aesthetic. It has countless creative languages.

Read elsewhere · Maki Oh