The average Ghanaian engages regularly with tailors and seamstresses, creating custom outfits from fabric they’ve either commissioned end-to-end, or purchased locally, explains Nimo. Some might source ready-made garments from local boutiques or the smattering of department stores in bigger cities, but this remains relatively nascent. Others might take part in National Friday Wear, a government campaign launched in 2004, encouraging Ghanaians to swap Western corporate attire for traditional fabric and products on Fridays, designed to drum up support for local industries.
Most locals own a variety of ceremonial clothing, which they would wear to weddings, funerals and other events that require them to look their best. “This is where most of their investment would go: buying some pricey local textiles and taking them to a tailor or seamstress,” says Nimo. That’s why, until recently, most of Ghana’s fashion designers operated a business model closer to that of couture, adds Aisha Ayensu, founder of womenswear label Christie Brown, which has become one of Ghana’s most prominent luxury brands over the past 18 years.
But these practices are increasingly fragile and at odds with emerging fashion systems. Recently, the biggest competition for homegrown textiles and more traditional fashion systems has been the influx of low-price secondhand garments from the Global North, says Mintah. Markets like Kantamanto in Accra exist all over Ghana at varying scales, receiving tens of millions of used garments from the Global North every week. And as the secondhand trade continues to bring high volumes of used ultra-fast fashion, it’s a double blow for local makers.
While many Ghanaians still engage with custom tailoring and homemade garments, the allure of cheap, ready-made clothes is growing, especially for younger generations who crave convenience and Westernized aesthetics, heavily influenced by what they see on social media, and more divorced from the meaning imbued in traditional textiles. “You cannot compete with the Sheins of the world,” says Mintah. “Not only is fast fashion collapsing our textile trade, it’s collapsing local industries like tailors and seamstresses, because they don’t get as much work anymore.”
An emerging market grappling with its past
To understand the state of Made in Ghana fashion today, you have to understand the history, says Nimo. The first thing to note is that the Ghanaian fashion system has been shaped as much by colonization as by Indigenous cultural practices, values and beliefs, he says.
Take Ankara: widely known as African wax prints today, they originated in Indonesian batik, which was mechanized by the Dutch during the colonial period and mass produced for export to its colonies across Africa. This process undercut the more labor-intensive textiles Indigenous to the continent, accelerating the erasure of traditional textiles, notes Mintah. “Most ordinary Ghanaians don’t see the wax prints as relics of colonialism,” she says. From the 1960s to the 1980s, a select group of African women were given exclusive rights to sell new designs, earning the nickname “Mama Benz” or “Nana Benz”, because the enterprise was lucrative enough to afford Mercedes-Benz cars. “People made so much money out of it that they stopped seeing it as something bad from the colonial trade,” she explains. Today, this market is nowhere near as lucrative, continues Mintah. With so many cheap, mass-produced imitations imported into Ghana, local manufacturers and artisans are dwindling.