image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
CHOOLIPS’ Designer Annegret Affolderbach is often referred to as a ‘fashion entrepreneur’ with an interesting background, great achievements and an inspiring vision. Annegret grew up in East Germany, but moved to London in the mid 90’s. Her interest in textiles and fabric techniques left her to look into bringing back to life ancient techniques such as Batik and to then create beautiful dresses aswell as jackets, playsuits, skirts and accessories. CHOOLIPS garments are made following strict Fairtrade principles and is produced by a local skilled workforce in the home country of those techniques, most notoriously in Ghana. The focus is to empower developing communities and flourishes on the concept of ‘Trade not Aid’.
Choolips redefines ancient textiles traditions introducing covetable luxuries of high quality craftsmanship back into fashion. Their womenswear & accessories collections tell stories of exquisitely detailed beauty. The beauty of their collections lies in a seamless blend of cultures, traditional crafts and innovative techniques, furthering equitable trade with each print or stitch made. Choolips‘ aim is to harmonise the mindset of producers and consumers and so they trade fairly, produce locally and have small water & carbon footprints.
We did a feature on this brand CHOOLIPS, as well as featuring them in our book Fashion Africa, showing how they have utilised their statement batik prints made in Ghana, into producing bright beautiful scarves for AW2011 showing how the label is growing into other product categories.
Their ‘Golden Coast’ collection is colourful, bright and bold. Inspired by the soul of Ghana’s streets: its music and its people it is fairly traded and printed by local batikers. Their accessories are hand finished by seamstresses in Ghana and garments are tailored by their producer SOKO in Kenya. Creamy swans and burning skies bring the flames to their Autumn/Winter12/13 Golden Coast collection which permeates streetstyle elegance. Burnt orange, milky cream and dirty blue with highlights of custard are splashed across our scarves with their Golden Coast trademark: hand printed batiks.
image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
As well as their African produced collection Choolips also have a new area of the business called their ‘Planet India’ collection also made by hands. Handspun on spinning wheels & handwoven khadi fabrics are embellished with handstitched applique details. Khadi is more than an exquisitely soft material. Khadi has enormous sustainable credentials. It ONLY consumes 3ltrs of water for 1metre of cloth in its entire production compared to mill cloth which consumes 55ltrs for 1metre. The range is produced in Ahmedabad, India.
But for now do check out the new collection of batik scarves supporting production in Africa.
image courtesy – Choolips AW12/13
www.choolips.com
www.twitter.com/choolips
email: curious@choolips.com
Model | Msimisi Dlamini, actor
Photography | Neil Dil Se Raja
