Angola's Passion for Fashion

After many years of isolation by the civil war, the Angolan fashion industry and its designers are now emerging and is winning plaudits for its fusion of African and interational style.  There was certainly no shortage of interest in Angolan's designs during Angolan's Fashion week in June 2010. There were eight Angolan designers altogether, including designers from Portugal, Brazil and the UK were present with an interest in the emerging designs.

Lucrécia Moreira, one of Angola's top designers states," Urban Angolans are characterized as very good consumers of fashion. This can be seen by walking down any street; they all like to dress well and look good. You can see all the new boutiques opening in Luanda – this is a big industry. When the Hugo Boss store opened a few years back, it made the most sales on its opening night of any Hugo Boss store in the world, which gives you an indication of the appetite people here have for fashion in Angola.”

Moreira’s work is a fusion of influences. She likes to use traditional African fabrics, patterns and colours with European flourishes to create a modern style but one with its roots in tradition. Explaining her style, Moreira said: “The education that we had during the long years of Portuguese colonisation did not allow us to interpret our own culture, so Angolans were not used to wearing African clothes.

“But through travelling around the continent I started to see that people in other African countries used African-style clothes and identified themselves as Africans through their clothes. It was from there that I started to create African fashion."

Ginga Neto, as pictured at left, has a Luanda boutique, Mahinda Prestige, that is becoming a fashion landmark. It is one of the few shops in the country where you can buy Angolan designed and produced clothes. The big attraction this season is Ginga’s new Jeanswear Collection, the first Angolan denim range, which comes with unique symbols of Chokwe sand paintings on the pockets. (Adapted from Sonangol Universo Magazine September 2010)