This article is part of our ‘(Re)Made in Ghana’ series, which explores what one of the world’s largest circular fashion ecosystems — Kantamanto Market — can teach us about the future of fashion. Read our series on ‘Made in Italy’ here, ‘Made in India’ here, and ‘Made in the UK’ here.
Four years ago, lawyer and African textiles expert Maame Konadu Mintah took a group of US law students to observe divorce proceedings in a rural Ghanaian village. They had traveled a long way to see the court in action, but their visit was surprisingly short. The man and the woman appeared wearing a set of fabrics, adorned with circles and swirls. “We just saw textiles with some circles, but everybody in the community could read what the textiles really meant,” says Mintah. “[The elders] explained that the woman’s fabric said she could not coexist with her husband, and her husband’s said he was sorry.” They were dismissed for two weeks. At the next hearing, if the wife wore textiles that said she would forgive her husband, the divorce would not go ahead, Mintah explains.
Mintah, struck by what she saw, committed her career to educating the next generation on the significance of Ghanaian textiles and the unique purpose they serve in society. Stories like the divorce hearing are plentiful. She tells me about textiles commissioned in lieu of a will, dictating how a family member’s belongings should be shared after death, although this is increasingly rare now Ghana has a formal legal system. She points to a design that can be worn by a pregnant woman to tell her fellow villagers that her husband is not providing for her, inviting donations before the baby arrives. Another signals that the wearer’s mother has recently passed away, letting the people around them know they are grieving.
“I could tell you about 300 different fabrics with different interpretations. It’s like another language,” says Mintah. “But if we do not protect these histories, we will lose them.”
Mintah is part of a growing revivalist movement trying to preserve and grow Ghana’s Indigenous fashion system. It’s a tall order. Colonialism, mass production and the advent of fast fashion have slowly eroded Ghana’s deep-rooted textile traditions. Now, as the country grapples with a textile waste crisis it did little to contribute to, and foreign investors look to leverage its low labor costs and advantageous tariffs, these forces are coming to a head — and a debate is brewing over what progress looks like. Can ‘Made in Ghana’ emerge as a leader in ethical production, while supporting its remaining artisans in the process?
A fashion system in flux
Many of the practices we now consider fundamental to circular fashion are deeply ingrained in Ghanaian culture, says Fred Nabi Yankey, remanufacturing lead at Ghanaian American non-profit The Or Foundation. “I grew up knowing that my big brother’s attire would be my attire,” he explains. “Repair and mending was key, and most people had sewing machines, because they were often part of women’s dowries.”
As these community-based practices attest to, the Ghanaian fashion industry is largely decentralized. There are tailors and seamstresses on every other street corner, and much fashion production happens on a case-by-case basis, in the family home. The lack of logistical infrastructure means e-commerce is not as “omnipresent” as it is in the Global North, and in-person shopping experiences are often prioritized over more detached online transactions, notes Ken Kweku Nimo, a Ghanaian researcher, brand strategist and author of Africa in Fashion.
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.
Post-independence from the United Kingdom, traditional textiles like Kente cloth played an important role in asserting Ghana’s presence on the global stage, says Nimo. “This was a country emerging from centuries of cultural domination. These materials, with all of their cultural symbolism, were valuable in shaping the Ghanaian identity. At the same time, Ghanaian designers became cultural activists and — in some cases — revivalists, choosing local materials over so-called European materials, and working with textile sectors that had been in steady decline.”
The designers that rose to fame in this period were intent on preserving Ghana’s textile traditions, while tailoring them to modern tastes. Juliana Kweifio-Okai, for example, was widely considered the first professionally trained designer in post-Independence Ghana, having trained at Paris’s oldest fashion school, ESMOD. Her brand, Chez Julie, became a symbol of nationalist and cosmopolitan Ghanaian identity, reimagining traditional silhouettes and textiles for the contemporary customer, and prioritizing local manufacturing. She worked in close partnership with Ghana Textiles Production (GTP), the country’s first state-owned textile manufacturing company.
Then, there was Kofi Ansah, who trained at the Chelsea School of Art in London, and cut his teeth at brands such as Gerald Austin and Guy Laroche before establishing his own studio and becoming one of Ghana’s most prominent design talents. Beyond using traditional African textiles like Kente and Bògòlanfini, Ansah was a staunch supporter of the broader fashion ecosystem in Ghana. He spearheaded the Ethical Fashion Initiative (a partnership between the United Nations and the Presidential Special Initiative program) and launched the Web Young Designers Hub alongside Vogue Italia’s then-editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani, to provide mentorship for young Ghanaians. Ansah was also instrumental in Ghana’s National Friday Wear program, raising awareness of traditional textiles as they began to decline, and normalizing their use in modern contexts.
Despite these efforts, the legacy of colonization still shows up for contemporary Ghanaian designers, says Ayensu. The founder has built her brand direct-to-consumer (DTC), lacking the wholesale relationships that emerging designers in the Global North have historically relied on from their first season.
“The idea behind Christie Brown was to build a powerhouse for the African continent, but we’re building a model that didn’t exist in Ghana before. Creative industries weren’t really taken seriously here, and banks didn’t understand the business model, so there was little access to finance,” she says. “Plus, the other sectors that support the fashion industry are being built simultaneously, which is where brands on the continent can struggle to deliver the same customer experience. You have to figure things out with very little resources and build for the context.”
Part of the challenge is co-creating a shared vision of who the African luxury consumer is, and finding a place for traditional textiles and local artisans in that vision, Ayensu continues. “There is still a lack of understanding of the African aesthetic and what luxury means to an African consumer,” she explains. “If you don’t take care, you are put in a box and forced to look a certain way. We as Africans need to define it for ourselves. If that means reinterpreting our traditional textiles, then so be it, but it has to be authentic.”
She’s not the only one reimagining traditional textiles, but not every designer takes as much care to respect the hidden meanings, says Mintah. She points to one designer whose collection claimed to empower women, but the textile they used communicated something entirely different: that the woman wearing it would do anything for a man, even if he disrespected her. “I wish the government would do some sort of orientation for brands and manufacturing companies coming into Ghana, so they understand the meaning of our textiles, use them in the right way, and respect the traditions we are working so hard to preserve,” says Mintah.
A manufacturing boom in waiting?
Ghanaian textile production dropped from 130 million yards in 1977 to just 15 million yards in 2017, according to researchers at Ghana’s Takoradi Technical University. Other African countries have experienced similar declines, coupled with increased competition from Asian manufacturing hubs, but Ghana is considered well-positioned for a comeback, unlike many of its neighbors. In late 2025, the local government announced plans to kickstart the revival of Made in Ghana fashion, drafting new policies aimed at generating $2 billion in annual economic value by 2033. The blueprint includes attracting some $1.2 billion in investments, creating 150,000 jobs, and reviving cotton cultivation to the tune of 50,000 hectares.
More recently, the Ghanaian government has enlisted the help of a prominent global think tank to drum up investment in local manufacturing. Among their tactics are brochures boasting Ghana’s potential, as well as a series of roadshows allowing potential investors to see it for themselves. One such brochure, shared with Vogue Business, claims that Ghana is primed for fashion manufacturing on the basis of its high rate of young, English-speaking workers, available to hire for $60-80 per month (the monthly minimum wage is $42); its “peaceful, stable and democratic” government (a major benefit compared to neighboring countries, I’m told); sewing sheds available from $2 per square meter per month; and favorable trade agreements, including duty-free access to the UK, the US, the EU and West Africa. Exactly how this plays out — and whether it becomes part of fashion’s continuous race to the bottom — is to be seen.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, community-driven initiatives are also looking to position Ghana as a leader in circular fashion and remanufacturing, combining potential employment opportunities with a scalable solution to the aforementioned textile waste crisis. The Or Foundation, for example, is currently roadtesting its new Remanufactory, an upcycling hub that employs tailors and seamstresses upskilled by the non-profit to help local upcycling designers (also trained by The Or Foundation on its OWO School program) scale. It will soon be open to third-party manufacturing.
“If we want to increase Made in Ghana — or in this case, Re-Made in Ghana — we need to invest in more spaces where remanufacturing can happen,” says The Or Foundation’s Yankey. “We need spaces equipped with machines, and skilled tailors who know how to upcycle. Remanufacturing could put Ghana on a pedestal.”
