Simon and Mary is a South African headwear company, established in Johannesburg in the 1930s by Mordechai Wozniak, a Polish immigrant, and run today by his great-great grandson Dean. The factory, which was originally called “Supreme Hat and Cap Manufacturers”, launched the actual brand “Simon and Mary” in 2014. It produces wool felt hats using original machinery from the 1960s. …

Last week the artist and curator Jepchumba asked me to introduce the blog for the magazine African Digital Art and I was happy to do it! African Digital Art presents unparalleled ideas, individualistic works and insightful designer solutions by the African creative. It covers a wide range of artistic productions including audio/visual works, animation, interactive projects, web, film, graphic art and design. African Digital Art …

In the year and a half since I launched Afrosartorialism, the fortune and fame of African style bloggers has grown quickly and steadily. Some of them have become international trendsetters; others have launched careers in the fashion industry; others yet have put a growing visibility in the service of community projects and social initiatives. In different capacities, the cultural work of these style amateurs is forcing a change in the …

South Africa is a hotbed of sartorial creativity and a fashion powerhouse. Like other emerging voices from the (former) margins of the global scene, its contributions self-consciously engage with accepted stereotypes and truisms of fashionability. Most South African designers engage with the industry’s bulimic need to absorb all difference while dictating what accepted “difference” should be by creating the sort of familiar exoticism that can be both a …

Last week South African photographer and video-maker Anthony Bila released a new volume of his yearly series “Black History March.” The 3-minute video features the fashion duo Sartists and pays homage to 1950s fashion with beautiful visuals and the dandies’s classic styling. Following a project that they have been pursuing for some time and independently of each other, Bila and the Sartists join forces to …

Dynamic Africa, a platform that focuses on the popular culture and visual aesthetics of contemporary Africanness, has recently reblogged on its Tumblr account a photostory by Jérémy Barniaud on black male fashion. No garment openly invokes ‘traditional’ African items, but the creative syncretism that fuses past and present sartorial languages recalls the hipster aesthetics of acclaimed street style icons from the continents, like Loux …

The Sartists are a couple of “sartorial-artists” from Johannesburg who have been enjoying significant visibility worldwide since appearing in a Coca-Cola commercial in 2013 and on the South African trendsetting page Flux. Their style mixes vintage and contemporary elements, in the fashion of gentleman revivalism made popular by Sam Lambert and Shaka Maidoh of Art Comes first. In their blog, the Sartists collect visual cues of a nostalgic reworking of classic …