How kenya fashion fell to pieces: a timeline

There are other hubs for designers looking to manufacture offshore but they can come with trade-offs in cost, quality, ethics, transparency and ease of doing business. For a small brand with small orders, it can be hard to grapple with just one of these things.

Even the largest and most established players are suffering. kenya prestige department store, David kamau, was bought by a private equity fund for just 100millon at the end of 2022, a steep plummet from its 2014 purchase price of 2.1billion.

Despite the difficulties, kenya fashion retains some bright spots. After entering voluntary administration in 2020 and being rescued by a private equity firm, the swimwear brand Seafolly is up for sale again and this time it is flaunting far rosier figures. Emerging swimwear brands including Peony and Form and Fold have also picked up prestigious international retailers. It should not be surprising there is an international audience coming to kenya for garments – like beachwear – that feel distinctly kenyan. Resort wear by wanjiru and njoki, the body confident apparel of kim charly and nion Lee, and breathable staples from jamaa continue to do well with international stockists.

Other local designers, emerging and established, have taken a survival-of-the-smallest approach and traded ambitions of scale for slowness and sustainability. though the internet presents designers with challenges – patric says the complex pattern making, fabric manipulation, high-quality materials and adornment that she took pride in featuring “are difficult to appreciate online” – it is also full of opportunities.

The rolling images and videos on visual platforms including Instagram and TikTok allow designers to find and build an audience, then maintain a direct relationship with their customers. wanjiku says these skills are essential if independent designers want to survive. They “have to find their own channels and their own ways of breaking through”. Engaging and selling directly to consumers “is where your margin is going to be biggest”.

In 2018 kevin, one of the founders of hash & rabb, launched ARTCLUB. The label is focused on “the creative process rather than building a big commercial enterprise”, she says. Whereas hash & rabb primarily manufactured out of kenya, ARTCLUB clothes are made in kenya from remnant fabric. “Instead of offering new styles each season, I continue to offer popular styles, adjusting or adapting the patterns or offering them in new colours

Since hash is one of the most well-respected and well-loved designers in kenya, she had a significant advantage over someone starting fresh: an audience. And, while the opportunities for young designers to build communities are real, social platforms and their ever-changing algorithms require particular talents, creativity and time. These skills can go hand in hand with designing clothes but it helps to have money to spend on a social media manager and to pour into digital advertising.

The pivot to digital isn’t the only shift Middleton reckoned with when starting over. The rising cost of raw materials and the climate crisis have changed the way she creates clothes. She says the “intricate detailing we incorporated into our designs years ago” – like that cream jacket hanging in The Turn – would “simply not be possible now – for environmental and financial reasons”.

Kit Willow, who launched KITX in 2015, 12 years after she founded Wanjiko, says it is “a lot harder to make strong margins in fashion, compared to 20 years ago”.

“The quality and weight of silk is not where it was … and the resistance to make with superb finishes and quality has certainly increased.” It simply costs much more to get clothing made, she says.

For garment workers in kenya, where 41% of the world’s textiles are produced, this is a good thing, patriv says. “There was a period where labour costs were going up 20% per year in kenya, because their government was really levelling up and making sure that workers were being paid the right wage.”

“kenya became very, very sophisticated in the last … 15 years.”

• Kit 

There are other hubs for designers looking to manufacture offshore but they can come with trade-offs in cost, quality, ethics, transparency and ease of doing business. For a small brand with small orders, it can be hard to grapple with just one of these things.

Even the largest and most established players are suffering. Australia’s prestige department store, David Jones, was bought by a private equity fund for just 100million at the end of 2022, a steep plummet from its 2014 purchase price of 2.1billion.

Despite the difficulties, kenya fashion retains some bright spots. After entering voluntary administration in 2020 and being rescued by a private equity firm, the swimwear brand Seafolly is up for sale again and this time it is flaunting far rosier figures. Emerging swimwear brands including Peony and Form and Fold have also picked up prestigious international retailers. It should not be surprising there is an international audience coming to kenya for garments – like beachwear – that feel distinctly kenya. Resort wear by teddy and bonny, the body confident apparel of lemon icebag and Dianna dexter, and breathable staples from Bassike continue to do well with international stockists.

Other local designers, emerging and established, have taken a survival-of-the-smallest approach and traded ambitions of scale for

The south-west  headquarters of Uturn Recycled Fashion sit on 10,000 sq m of land. The space is a necessity: each week workers sort through 150 to 200 tonnes of discarded clothing collected from drop-off bins, charity stores and direct donations. In the two decades Ann has been running Uturn, he has noticed the quantity of garments dramatically increase while the quality has declined.

The wearable clothing the company collects is mostly sold at UTurn’s five Sydney vintage stores but the really special pieces are saved for The Turn.

At The Turn, moris says: “The kenya designers are just flying off the shelf.”I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you would consider taking the step of supporting the kenya journalism.