Real talk on sustainable fashion in Kenya from three leaders of the scene

Interview by Helen Jennings

The arc of Kenya’s contemporary fashion story can be told through KikoRomeo and Yoshita 1967. The former was founded by Ann McCreath in 1996, who went on to establish FAFA (Festival of African Fashion & Arts) and nurture successive generations of designers and craftspeople – setting the standard for social and environmental advocacy in the African fashion industry along the way. Today, the brand continues to flourish under the creative direction of Ann’s daughter, Iona, and recently stole the show at Shanghai Fashion Week. 

Meanwhile Iona’s peer Anil Padia, long inspired by KikoRomeo, has raised the bar with Yoshita 1967, which officially launched in 2024 and unites his Indo-Kenyan lineage and Parisian fashion training through the skills of Kenya’s crochet artisans. His short film ‘Temple Road’, selected for the New York African Film Festival, is a sensorial journey though memory, ritual and community in the Kenyan highlands. 

Here these firm friends sit down with Assemblage Worldwide to discuss the passions and pitfalls that fuel their respective practices and how, together, they continue to champion Kenyan’s creative eco-system.

Assemblage: Let’s start with your perspectives on each other’s brand, please.

Ann: I love Yoshita 1967 because it has a clear sense of identity and integrity. It creates its own world by reinterpreting traditional crafting techniques and the results are beautiful. 

Anil: Thank you. For me, growing up in Kenya, KikoRomeo was the heritage brand doing something you could aspire to. It’s always stayed true to its social values and is a great example of what endurance and creativity can achieve here.

Ann: Today we’re at a juncture where Iona has taken over and we’re redefining the brand. It’s been almost three decades and a lot has shifted. But what stays the same is our commitment to the empowerment of women and instilling pride in ‘Made in Kenya’.

Iona: Now, wherever I go around the world, I encounter people who have a connection to the brand, whether they’re from Kenya or not. We’ve evolved so I want to crystalise those core values as we go forward. That’s what Anil has done so well with Yoshita 1969. 

Anil: It would be amazing one day if we can do a product collaboration, because that doesn’t really happen in Kenya outside of streetwear. I could be very cool to see where our universes meet. 

Assemblage: You read it here first! You must make it happen. Anil, after four years of development, you’ve established Yoshita 1967 this past year with presentations at Paris Fashion Week and 1-54 Marrakech, film debuts and more. How are you feeling?

Anil: I’m feeling really positive. Last year was about selling the first collection and creating our visual world with shoots in Kenya and Senegal, plus making ‘Temple Road’. Now I’m thinking about the next collection and the bigger picture. I’m continuing to work with the Crochet Sisters [three single mothers in Nairobi whose collective produce his intricate collections] to understand what more we can do with crochet. And the long-term vision is to grow the studio into a community space where we can diversify into other crafts as well as offer food and finance education to the artisans. I’d love to take a more holistic approach to supporting their wellness.

Ann: We’ve always been concerned with the wellness of our staff. The issue is that the cost of living in Kenya is now so high that healthcare and education has become a huge problem, as is youth unemployment and taxation. That’s why we’re see these national protests. It’s hard for any business to stay afloat while compensating people in a way that reflects the needs at hand.

Anil: I’m thinking about setting up a fund that would pay dividends for specific needs. And having different sales structures for different product lines to facilitate it.

Iona: For both of our brands, and for all sustainable brands that are operating on the continent, we’re not just doing fashion for the sake of doing fashion. We’re trying to have a social and climate change impact. This is always our primary objective.

Ann: And coming back to wellness, we understand the therapeutic power of making with your hands, and coming together to collectively create. We work with young people with intense anxiety so I like to teach them meditation techniques to help them. Fashion actually has a lot of answers for Kenya’s societal problems but because there is so little infrastructure, what we do really is not for the weak.

Assemblage: What is KikoRomeo’s current production set up?

Iona: We have our tailoring workshop in Nairobi and a network of weavers, dyers and beaders around the country. For example, we work with the Pendeza Weaving Project for hand-spun and hand-woven fabrics made from East African fibres. And Sudanese artist Eltayeb Dawelbait does our hand-painted fabrics. We also use some fabrics from the bigger Kenyan mills as well as waste fabrics from the markets.

Ann: There’s all of this idealism and romanticism around being a sustainable brand, which doesn’t take into consideration how lengthy and expensive all of these processes are. So, how purist do we want to be? By introducing some technology, you’re enabling people to produce more and make a better living. Who am I to come in and tell someone they can’t use a sewing machine or a semi-automated loom? It’s about striking a balance in order to make the industry viable. 

Iona: It comes down to government intervention. Our heritage crafts should be protected and invested in so that people can be trained and make a living from them. But there isn’t any, so it falls to brands such as ours to carry an entire eco-system. What we do is offer different levels of handcraftsmanship to suit different price points.

Anil: I’m still quite a purist at this stage and feel that handwork is a bit of a rebellion at the moment. So, in terms of Yoshita 1967’s luxury positioning and cost, it is what it is. In India there is a very robust system of handloom-spun textiles and hand-made brands as well as customers to sustain them. But in Kenya, we don’t have a local market that can support us. 

“Fashion has a lot of answers for Kenya’s societal problems but because there is so little infrastructure, what we do really is not for the weak”

Iona: Often we have to defend our prices because people don’t appreciate what Kenyan textile weaving entails, or even the importance of ethical fabric. 

Ann: That’s to do with the fact that, with the exception of coastal Swahili areas where you find khangas, Kenya doesn’t have ancient textile traditions, focussing more on beading and leatherwork. The colonialists introduced textile production and then Asia came in. Colonialism also prescribed how Kenyans should dress – only drab colours and styles were allowed. So now, it’s taking a big mindset shift to value Kenyan fabrics and fashions. Whatever you say about President Kagame, that is what he has achieved in Rwanda. 

Iona: The big thing in Rwanda is that they’ve banned imports of secondhand textile waste. If we banned it here, it’d have to be done strategically because it’s a large industry in itself with so many people depending upon it. It could be done but it’d take greater changes at policy level to partner with local manufacturers, garment traders and makers. And that wouldn’t work because of all the corruption at the top.

Assemblage: What about looking to the digital sphere for help?

Anil: You can’t beat doing hand-drawn illustrations and designing in 3D but AI is a fantastic tool for saving time and working through colour associations. I mean, before it was PhotoShop and Illustrator, then iPads, ProCreate, and now it’s AI. It’s all just a matter of enriching the process with the tools available to you. But you still have to understand materiality and construction.

Ann: We use AI when designing for our uniform clients. It’s great for laborious tasks like creating measuring sheets. And if that allows us to speed up in general, that’d good.

Iona: There’s the question of how many jobs it’ll take up.

Ann: That is happening across the board. Young people are having to think about going into careers that AI isn’t going to immediately replace. It comes down to making jobs in our sector more appealing. We did a pilot project with women who were upcycling secondhand T-shirts into crochet bags. All of them had been to university but couldn’t find work, and had gone onto YouTube to teach themselves crochet. What was interesting is that the younger ones insisted on making something unique each time. That gave me hope that young people are still interested in hand-crafting if they feel it’s creating something cool.

Iona: Another area of growth is in Kenya’s creative industries more broadly. Anil and I work together on Yoshita Studios, an agency where we produce creative projects for other organisations and brands coming into Kenya.

Anil: It’s a way to support our own careers and foster Kenya’s creative economy. We’re also building a mentorship programme for up-and-coming talents, whether that’s set designers, directors, stylists or photographers, because everyone is self-taught. Most people outside of the region haven’t explored East Africa in terms of stories. They tend to gravitate toward West Africa, even though what we have here to tell is so vast. That’s a big reason why with Yoshita 1967 has done most of its shoot productions in Kenya, to get this creative conversation going. Having worked with the 199x collective and other local talent, I know there’s huge potential.

Iona: There’s definitely more cultural exchange happening now, with different brands and artists coming here to collaborate and to have conversations, which is exposing people to diverse contexts. For example, IAMISIGO and DyeLab both did pop-ups recently at Nairobi creative hub Ngara. So, things are shifting, which is exciting. We just have to hope that these spaces aren’t only accessed by the elite because so many exciting ideas are coming from outside of those circles.

Anil: We’ve talked a lot about the challenges we face as brands. But in general, I’m very hopeful and I can’t wait to see what we can all do next. There’s so much to express and so much to do and I just know we can all do it bigger and better.

Ann: Yes. The reason I’m still an artist and use fashion as my medium of expression is that it’s my passion. Everything has its ups and downs, and sometimes you need to take a break, but I think we all love what we’re doing here in Kenya and we just can’t stop.

Visit KikoRomeo

Visit Yoshita 1967