In a former seventeenth-century church in Brescia, Anna Renzi Brivio makes garments by beginning where fashion often ends: with a person, a body, and the time required to understand both.
In Addis Ababa, Sabahar works with spinners, dyers and weavers whose knowledge belongs to one of Ethiopia’s oldest material traditions. Keeping that knowledge alive, however, requires more than preservation: it requires change.
This is the second story in an "A Bag of Stories" series exploring Ethiopian culture through everyday practices and knowledge. At Ensira Pottery Center in Addis Ababa, women shape the jebena amid children, kilns, fragile pots, and shared life.
Through Tecla, ceramic designer and cultural planner Camilla Garelli looks beyond the finished object, following the materials, gestures, relationships, and meanings that allow a thing to become part of a life.
At Zoma Museum in Addis Ababa, architecture, art, education, cultivation, and daily life belong to the same living system. AFAR’s relationship with the museum began in friendship and has grown through years of shared work, visits, and images.
AFAR uses vegetable-tanned zebu leather and horn recovered from existing Ethiopian farming and food systems. “By-product” is not a claim of innocence. It describes where the material begins, and the responsibility that follows.
36 portrait posters featuring the people who make AFAR bags in Addis Ababa. Inspired by a question raised by Fashion Revolution, the project brings the viewer inside the workshop: who stands behind the objects we use every day?
Hands carry knowledge that rarely enters official language. They measure, cut, weave, polish, repair, remember, and give form to materials before they become objects.
As we continue to build "A Bag of Stories", the AFAR magazine, we turn our attention to another design from the Raffia Collection: Kaluwa, a distinctive woven bag created in two sizes for the lighter rhythm of summer.
