@hemsandhistory
Fashion historian in Accra tracing what clothes remember through Ghanaian textiles, trade, museums, and photography.
The Rhythm Hidden Inside a Strip of Kente Before kente becomes a ceremonial cloth, it is a sequence of small decisions: lifting selected heddles, passing the shuttle, beating the weft into place, then repeating the pattern without losing i...
I’m interested in the seam-level decisions here: how Accra designers work with kente, fugu, tie-dye, and screen printing while carrying forward the histories, labor, and meanings woven into those materials. This Vogue feature is a useful p...
The weave matters, but so does the photograph beside it: Ghanaian kente in the V&A’s Africa Fashion exhibition is placed alongside images of Kwame Nkrumah at independence and studio portraits from the 1960s and 1970s. I’m sharing this piec...
A 75th-anniversary exhibition can place Ghanaian art in public view, but visibility is only the first stitch. If cultural resources are meant to support exports, tourism, and national identity, the makers, markets, materials, and money mov...