4 minute read
Bobby Kolade
Redressing the balance
This 32-year-old Ugandan designer is turning the world’s exploitative secondhand clothing industry on its head, one beautiful garment at a time
Words EMINE SANER Photography IAN NNYANZI
As a teenager growing up in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, Bobby Kolade would buy secondhand clothes and get a tailor to remake them to his own designs – belts sewn onto shirts, trousers reassembled with patches. Almost 20 years later, and now a professional designer, Kolade is doing it himself, except his modern-day creations are as much a political statement as a fashion one.
Uganda, like many countries in Africa, has a huge secondhand clothing industry that is fuelled by the overconsumption of disposable ‘fast fashion’ in high-income countries. Clothes – often those donated to charity – are shipped to African countries, where they’re resold or, worse, dumped in landfill.
Kolade turns this around. Born in Sudan and raised in Kampala by his Nigerian mother and German father, the designer studied fashion in Berlin and spent more than a decade working for fashion houses in Europe, including Balenciaga and Maison Margiela. In 2018, he came back to Kampala, where he launched his clothing brand Buzigahill three years later. Its first project, Return to Sender, sees Kolade and his team transform clothes discarded by consumers in the Global North into high-end pieces to be sold back to them. Sweat stains not included.
: When did you become interested in fashion?
: When I was 14, I’d cut up clothes and get them sewn back together. Then my interest developed in Berlin. I was studying graphic design, but I was always with the fashion crowd, so I changed courses. The idea of working with different materials, colours, textures, and playing with shape and form is what attracted me. I wanted to start a brand that used Ugandan cotton to create sustainable clothes, from a studio in Berlin. That’s embarrassing, because it shows I had the mindset of the Global North: extractive – the high-level jobs would be in Europe, and we’d just have people in Uganda producing things. After doing more research, towards the end of 2017 I decided to relocate permanently [to Uganda]. It was liberating.
When did you become aware of issues with secondhand clothing? Around 2015. As a teenager, I’d go to Owino Market in Kampala and rummage through the piles to find cool clothes. Then, in Berlin, I was donating clothes to charity bins. So I was a participant, unaware what was going on. I was disappointed in myself, and furious with the system. Around 80 per cent of all textile and clothing purchases in [Uganda] are secondhand, so it’s hard to compete as a designer and producer. Uganda produces world-class cotton, but 95 per cent is exported as a raw material.
What’s the psychological impact of wearing these cast-offs?
There’s a lot of choice and it’s affordable, but culturally it’s a problem. Is there anything left that’s Ugandan? [The country has] been overtaken by Western styles. I open a bale of clothes and all the armpits on the white shirts are stained with sweat. Many people in the Global North assume there are poor Africans running around naked and in need of these clothes. That idea has to change. This is a huge business, and there are people making a lot of money. In an ideal world, the CEOs of [fashion retail] companies would seek therapy and ask themselves, “Is what we’re doing beneficial only to the Global North?” Then we’d be talking about colonialist consumption patterns – that people in wealthier countries can only buy cheap clothing because they’re exploiting people at the production and disposal ends.
How does it feel turning discarded clothing into a beautiful garment?
There are mixed feelings. It’s very satisfying to send parcels [back to customers in wealthy countries]. But, at present, the environment isn’t as professional as it could be, and secondhand clothes are unpredictable – we buy big bales and we don’t know what we’ll get. The label will say ‘T-shirts’, but we don’t know what type or if they have holes or stains. It’s very hard to set up design and production processes. I call it reactionary design. It means things are never boring.
How has your time in high fashion translated to what you do now?
I’ve had to forget almost everything I learned. There’s a certain level of rawness we’ve had to integrate into our designs. We don’t even have mood boards any more. We don’t come up with collection themes. The contents of the bale dictate everything.
What are your plans for Buzigahill?
We’re looking for studio space – the six of us are working from my living room right now. There’s huge potential for us to work in upcycling, generating new fibres using waste, and also integrating Ugandan cotton into the collection – my initial dream. I’d like to introduce local craft, set up small factories, and develop national pride through clothing. All these issues are political, environmental, and we’re in the middle of a clothing catastrophe. But the atmosphere in the studio is great – we’re all learning, we laugh a lot, and we’re making a positive story out of this situation. buzigahill.com
