Loza who this year was awarded Arise Magazine Fashion Week’s Emerging Designer of the Year 2012, is one of our favourite designers for celebrating our love of traditional hand woven cloth in Africa. She truly believes that the fashion is in the fabric and held a recent campaign redefine the quality of W. African’s products in the eyes of the rest of the world. Her aim is to fulfil her vision to empower Ivorian women to levitate their social and economic conditions. She believes
“When a lower class African woman is provided with a job she re-invests in her children’s education and improve the quality of life in her home and community. Also, to remunerate ONE African is to feed an average of SEVEN people (The average African household)”.
Maleombho was born in Brazil and raised in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.and supports ‘Fashion for change’ through her brand. It supports the social and economic empowerment of women in Côte d’Ivoire and so we celebrate what she is doing as overall it creates jobs by building local factories and workshops for production at present in Côte-d’Ivoire. It also highlights and helps to sustain traditional fabrics and crafts. This is seen clearly in her past designs where you find Kente fabric used prominently with hand woven 100% cotton. Kente cloth can be found in certain areas of Côte d’Ivoire but is tradtitionally found to be hand woven by the Akan tribe of Ghana.
There is a strong sense of geometry throghout the collection alongside a statement of stripes, highlight of handwoven fabrics complimented through the unfinished frills of the fabric selvedge. An amazingly subtle yet impactfully gentle use of bright colours, interesting pattern cutting for untraditional silhouettes and overall looks like she had fun with it.
For us this is not her strongest collection that we have seen but equally one that is sustaining a strong belief in celebrating what is truly African.
SO here below is a sneak peek from her SS13 collection. Share your thoughts too!
Definitely our AFG favourite piece from the loza maleombho SS13 collection
loza maleombho SS13 collection
loza maleombho SS13 collection
loza maleombho SS13 collection – GORGEOUS JACKET!
loza maleombho SS13 collection
loza maleombho SS13 collection
loza maleombho SS13 collection
