As both scholar and designer, Christine Checinska has worked in fashion for decades. Through the years, she has developed a substantial body of work on the relationship between race, culture, and cloth, focusing on British and British-diasporan contexts. She is currently Curator of African and African Diaspora Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where she is curating Africa Fashion, …

On 8 May, I presented the ongoing research on African designers in Italy that I am conducting with Caterina Pecchioli of “B&W: Black and White – The Migrant Trend”. The presentation, that we entitled “Designing Identity: A Visual Proposition to examine migrant and second-generation fashion in Italy” can be viewed at this link, starting at 4:26:22.

The African Lookbook is the new Bloomsbury publication gathering 130 photographs of stylish women taken between 1870 and 1970. The photographs belong to Catherine McKinley’s large collection of vernacular and studio shots from over 40 African countries and spanning the early colonial decades through the present. I had the pleasure to interview Catherine on the book, which is the first …