China Africa Fashion Power

“I am a night owl!” - The daily routine of African fashion traders in Guangzhou--Ke Ma

In March 2026, I landed in Guangzhou, ready to dive into the world of African fashion businesses. Jet-lagged but eager, I made my way to the wholesale clothing district near Sanyuanli metro station before noon. The area teemed with malls and shops, yet to my surprise, few African faces were visible in the crowds. The African restaurants sat shuttered, their metal grilles pulled down like sleepy eyelids.

A few days later, as I got to know more Nigerian fashion businessmen, the picture came into focus. In recent years, the widespread use of WhatsApp and WeChat in the China-Africa fashion trade has rewired their internal clocks. “I am a night owl,” one of them told me. He and other African fashion traders in Guangzhou no longer sync with the Chinese sun but with their customers thousands of miles away in Lagos, Accra, or Nairobi: customers who are just waking up as Guangzhou winds down.

Take Chukwuka, a 35-year-old sourcing agent from Nigeria. One afternoon around 5:00 pm, we went to the U:US wholesale market, a buzzing labyrinth of knockoffs. As we walked, he held his phone like a third hand—already on a WhatsApp video call with a client back in Lagos. Inside a cap shop, he began pulling baseball caps off the rack: black, navy, olive. He tried one on, tilted it low, then another. “Which one do you want?” He asked the screen in Igbo, turning left and right. “Here is also a denim color. And baker hats, yeah? Three each? Or two?” His client pointed through the pixelated glare. Chukwuka nodded, counted on his fingers, and confirmed the quantity and colors in written text. Then he hung up. “Now I need to negotiate the price,” he said, turning to me with a grin. And just like that, his English switched off. Fluent Chinese flowed out instead as he bargained hard with the Chinese shop owner. We then walked around the market to check out men’s shoes while waiting for the hat shop to gather and pack the goods he had purchased. Chukwuka constantly took pictures of the sandals and sneakers and sent voice messages on WhatsApp to his potential clients, explaining whether the shoes were made of real leather and what material was used for the soles.

As we walked out of the wholesale mall, the sun had already slipped behind Guangzhou’s hazy skyline – it was already 8:00 pm. The street, dormant under the midday heat, had transformed. Now it pulsed with life: Foreign traders moving in small clusters, many hauling black plastic bags or dragging suitcases. The air filled with a polyglot hum: English, Igbo, French, Mandarin. Suddenly, a Chinese man darted toward us, waving a paper printed with the latest counterfeit bags. “Copy, copy! Come to our office to take a look – it’s just on the sixth floor in this building.” He points to the shopping mall on his right-hand side. He was not alone. Other Chinese vendors of counterfeit fashion goods pressed toward any foreign face, whispering the same urgent mantra. Around small food stands, queues had formed: men and women in colorful summer outfits and sneakers waiting for fresh mango juice or lamb skewers sizzling over charcoal. Chukwuka glanced at me and grinned. “This is still the start. Wait until the night arrives.”
After dinner at a nearby African restaurant, the clock neared 10:00 pm. We stepped back outside and walked toward Guangyuanxi Road. There, the street had shed its daytime skin entirely. Rows of clothing stands now lined both sidewalks, their LED lanterns casting a cold blue glow over piles of T-shirts, sneakers, jewelry, and knockoff watches. African men and women haggled in low, rapid voices, phones pressed to ears, some livestreaming to customers back home.

Next to Guangyuanxi Road, on the ground floor of Tangqi Plaza, was what Chukwuka calls his “office.” We carried the caps he had purchased into the space, which was a narrow warehouse room he shares with a few of his Nigerian “bros.” The room was stuffed with bags labeled in both Chinese and English. Next to their warehouse were other small units, filled with Nigerian men chatting, joking, and packaging. Chukwuka excels at packaging: he puts the newly purchased garments into a bag and swiftly sews it shut using a large needle and thick thread. Just after midnight, the Chinese staff from a freight-forwarding company arrived, weighed his bags, charged him, loaded them into a truck, and moved to the next Nigerian trader. If everything goes well, the goods will arrive in Nigeria in six days. After talking to a few more potential customers on WhatsApp while clearing up his office, Chukwuka headed home to Foshan city at almost 2:00 am, together with other Nigerian friends who also rent apartments there.

Chukwuka and his Nigerian “bros” work nearly every day. Sunday is usually a bit quieter, as many attend church. As Chukwuka explained to me, this is a trade in which the time one invests is directly reflected in the money one makes. Leisure is not entirely absent, but it is carefully scheduled around the demands of African markets. Most Nigerian fashion traders are men who are either single or have partners back home. During their free time, some simply stay home to watch movies and chill; others have memberships at 24-hour gyms and work out at night. Occasionally, they go to Afro nightclubs in Guangzhou to dance and relax – “But not before 2:00 am,” one of them told me, “You finish work around 2:00 am, go home and fresh up, and then you go out again.” By 5:00 am, the club grows crowded and heated. When one finally steps out of the club, the sun has already risen over Guangzhou.

Excited to share Prof Tommy Tse's new publication! He is the PI of the project China Africa Fashion Power. Please read and share!

Fashions in Africa, and Africas in Fashion – Global Africa as Method “‘Africa’ can mean many things… there are thus multiple Africas, including regions, diverse politics and economies, and some 2,140 living languages” (Large 2021, 9). This article proposes Global Af...

Thank you to everyone who joined us on 14 November for the launch of the second edition of Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists! ✨

We were honoured to welcome the book’s editors, Agnès Rocamora (London College of Fashion) and Anneke Smelik (Radboud University).

Tommy Tse (University of Amsterdam) moderated a lively panel featuring Roberto Filippello (UvA) on Edward Said, Diego Semerene (UvA) on Judith Butler, and Jane Tynan (VU Amsterdam) on Michel Foucault

From theory to practice, the discussion opened up rich conversations about how foundational thinkers continue to shape, and be shaped by contemporary fashion scholarship.

✨ Thank you for being part of such a stimulating event!

Thank you to everyone who joined us, both in person and online, for “Retheorising Creativity and Authenticity of Fashion in Kenya,” a hybrid guest lecture organized with IIAS and led by Dr. Tommy Tse (University of Amsterdam).

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research in Nairobi and China, Dr. Tse explored how fakes, originals, and copies circulate through Kenya’s fashion markets, reshaping how creativity, value, and authenticity are understood beyond Western frameworks.

The Q&A, moderated by Dr Wei Wang and PhD researcher Fairuzah Atchulo, opened rich discussions.

Thank you to our speakers, partners, and attendees for an inspiring and thought-provoking event. More CAFP programmes coming soon. ✨

First image - from left: Jiaying Tu, Fairuzah Atchulo, Dr. Tommy Tse, Dr. Adwoa Owusuaa Bobie, Annemarie Leeuwen, and Dr. Jupiter Wei Wang

The final Global Africa seminar of this academic semester is just around the corner, and I cordially invite you to this event. Please also feel free to share this invitation with your other networks.

ASCA GLOBAL AFRICA SEMINAR SERIES EVENT #3

The ASCA Global Africa Reading Group is delighted to announce the details of our third and final seminar of this academic semester, titled “Histories and Materialities of Second-Hand Clothes.” The seminar will be held on Friday, 21 November 2025 (3:00–4:30pm CET) in Room 0.16, BG1, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012 XT Amsterdam. All speakers will attend in person. Drinks and snacks will be served afterwards.

Online attendance is also possible. Please use the QR code on the poster above or this Zoom link: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/81511351310.

The speakers will be Mwangi Mwaura and Jiaying Tu.

Mwangi Mwaura will give a talk titled “Reading/Intuiting Cloth Tags: Second-hand Clothes Materiality, Ecological Harms and Creative Market Survivance in Gikomba Market, Nairobi.”

Mwangi is a Kenyan Rhodes Scholar and currently a DPhil (PhD) student in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His ethnographic research focuses on second-hand clothes in the UK and Nairobi, Kenya. He has previously written on urbanism, including urban infrastructures, demolitions, and habitation in various Nairobi neighbourhoods.

Mwangi’s talk explores the embodied knowledge of traders at Nairobi’s Gikomba market, focusing on how second-hand clothes are sorted and categorised in bales, informing their market value and whether they are upscaled, downscaled, or discarded. The paper draws on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork that includes selling alongside traders, creative mapping, photography, audio, and video exercises. It examines how the materiality of clothes — polyester, cotton, linen, etc. — is sensed through embodied knowledge and shapes decisions on use. In this process, traders identify ecological harms and decide which items need to be upscaled and how. There are multiple ways of upscaling second-hand clothes in this market, which Mwangi refers to as creative market survivance.

Jiaying Tu will give a talk titled “Tales of Bales: Mediating Power, Value and Transparency in the Global Trade of Second-hand Clothing (field insights from China).”

Jiaying is a PhD student in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam and is affiliated with the China Africa Fashion Power project. Her research examines the cultural economy of second-hand clothing (SHC) consumption in Ghana and how Ghana’s SHC market is implicated in global production networks led by China. Her project investigates how SHC consumption unfolds and evolves in the Ghanaian context and how it is shaped by “Made in/(From) China,” raising questions about global circular economies and the sustainable development of African local industries. For this seminar, she presents insights from her first-year pilot study.

Jiaying’s talk takes the “bale system” — the strategic bundling of individual garments into compressed, standardized units for export — as an analytical lens through which to examine the politics of power, value, and transparency structuring the global trade in second-hand clothing. Starting with a largely overlooked historical archive that records the arrival of second-hand clothes on China’s southern coast in the mid-1980s — themselves transported in bales aboard fishing boats — the talk traces the changes of strategic bundling in this transnational trade from early “black-box/surprise bag” to the adoption of “fine sorting” in factory-like warehouses across regions like Guangdong, China. This province, which Jiaying recently visited, now hosts one of the highest concentrations of second-hand clothes sorting and export companies in the world. The majority of its exports are heading towards countries like Kenya, Tanzania, Congo and Ghana in sub-Saharan Africa. Through this trajectory, the talk examines how the "bale system" enables the continual reinvention of value and the integration of disparate clothing cultures into a fragmentarily unified global network of exchange. Drawing on interviews with Chinese factories, it further conceptualizes the bale as a site of co-production and contestation, offering firsthand vignettes of “Made in China” seen through the production not of garments but of clothing bales. As a big producer and consumer of garments, and currently the largest exporter of second-hand clothes, China invites further study into its textile recycling and export industries.

Moderated by: Fairuzah Atchulo (University of Amsterdam)

We warmly invite everyone to join this academic and networking event. See you there!

*Poster designed by Chloe Chau.

🌍 Hybrid Guest Lecture | Retheorising Creativity and Authenticity of Fashion in Kenya

A guest lecture by Tommy Tse, Associate Professor in the Global Cross-Media Cultures programme, University of Amsterdam (UvA) and IIAS Board member.

When Nairobi shopkeepers proudly declared his “original” Adidas sneakers fake—but “a good deal, even better than the real”—Tommy Tse began rethinking what authenticity means. Drawing on over two years of ethnography in Kenya and China, this talk explores how fashion’s fakes, originals, and copies co-create new meanings of creativity and value.

The Q&A is moderated by Dr Wei Wang (UvA) and PhD Researcher Fairuzah Atchulo (UvA).

You can join online or in person. Registration is required as seating is limited, and to receive the Zoom link: https://www.iias.asia/events/retheorising-creativity-and-authenticity-fashion-kenya

🗓 13 November 2025
🕑 14:00–15:30 CET
📍 IIAS Conference Room, Leiden + Online via Zoom

Organised by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) with support from the University of Amsterdam

📚 Book Launch | Thinking Through Fashion

Join us for the launch of the second edition of Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists.

Editors Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik will be joined by Tommy Tse, Roberto Filippello, Diego Semerene, and Jane Tynan.

💬 Expect lively discussion, new perspectives on fashion theory, and reflections on the intersections of fashion, culture, and thought.

📅 14 November 2025
🕒 15:00–16:30 CET
📍 UB D2.08 (Ruyszaal), Amsterdam University Library (UvA), Vendelstraat 2- 8, 1012 XX Amsterdam.

🔗 Zoom link & full details here: https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org/event-details/thinking-through-fashion-book-launch

It is meaningful that our ERC ethnographic research finds resonance outside academic circles. MO* Magazine (Belgium) offers an extensive feature on the paradoxes of Europe’s fashion sustainability and the global secondhand trade. Please feel free to share within your own networks.

The piece explores what happens when “throwing away clothes is forbidden, yet burning them remains an option”—unpacking Europe’s circular fashion promises, the fragile position of secondhand collectors, and the transcontinental flows that link Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Grateful to Sarah Vandoorne for her insightful reporting, to Lieve Van den Bulck for shaping the piece so thoughtfully, and to Aurélie Van de Peer, who made this collaboration possible in the first place.

🔗 To read the full article, please visit this link: https://www.mo.be/analyse/Kleding-weggooien-verboden-dan-verbranden-de-tweedehandsinzamelaars-ze-zelf