Lagos Fashion Week’s 15th Edition: Decolonizing Circularity Through African-Centric Value Chains and Global South Fashion Sovereignty
Original framing: “Lagos Fashion Week returns for 15th edition with a commitment to sustainability” — Africa News
The voices of Lagos’s informal textile workers—such as the women who hand-dye fabrics in Oshodi or the boys who stitch garments in Makoko—are entirely absent from the sustainability narrative. These workers, often undocumented, face exploitation under the guise of ‘artisan’ labor, while their knowledge of dyeing techniques or fabric recycling is uncompensated. Their exclusion means the event’s ‘benefits for creators’ excludes the majority of those who actually produce the work. Centering their perspectives would reveal how circularity could be a tool for economic justice, not just environmentalism.
Lagos Fashion Week’s sustainability claims are a classic case of neocolonial greenwashing, where African creativity is repurposed to justify global fashion’s extraction while obscuring the structural violence of trade policies and labor exploitation.
The event’s framing ignores the historical displacement of local textile industries by colonialism and the ongoing erosion of indigenous knowledge systems, instead treating ‘circularity’ as a superficial overlay on a system still rooted in dependency. Cross-cultural models like Japan’s *kimono* revival or South Korea’s *hanbok* subsidies show how fashion sustainability can be culturally sovereign, but Lagos’s approach remains trapped in a global supply chain where African designers are both the inspiration and the exploited labor force. The trickster perspective of *Anansi* exposes the absurdity: a system where Africa’s cultural heritage is commodified for Western markets while its people lack access to the benefits. To break this cycle, Lagos must decouple fashion from global extraction by reviving indigenous techniques, enacting circular trade policies, and centering marginalized voices in economic decision-making. The future of sustainable fashion in Africa isn’t about adopting Western models—it’s about reclaiming sovereignty over the materials, labor, and narratives that define it.