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As we gear up for the second of our three-part “Lesela as Calico” Patternmaking Workshop in Kampala, Uganda we thought to share a few images from our last two sessions with our first cohort. 

So far, we have learned how to make and work with DIY plastic mannequins, challenged what we thought we knew through drafting Bunka basic sloper blocks for the first time and engaged in collaborative problem solving.

We continue with feedback sessions this week, explore Pattern Magic II written by Tomoko Nakamichi further and reflect on the importance of how workshops such as these can contribute towards reparative research in indigenous textile and craft knowledge(s) from the African continents long past.

Pattern Magic II is curated as part of the AFRI-Lab Workshop Series and is supported by The Bold Woman Fund, an initiative of and the British Council as part of its Creative DNA Programme 2026.

Fashion_The Image 

Fashion images matter. They shape how fashion is known, remembered, encountered and imagined. Fashion photography promises truth, yet it moves in fictional ways. Its images become the archive that carries the grammars of fashion across time. 

This exhibition considers the fashion photograph as a site of knowledge and futurity. While some images fade from view, others endure, becoming iconic markers of style, innovation and cultural memory.

Rather than dismiss these images as fleeting, the works gathered here invite attention to the futures that they bring into view. The photographs render identities, sensibilities, desires, intimacies and pride visible, and help imagine and shape our afrocentric visual landscapes.

Drawing on art, vernacular portraiture and collaboration, these images emerge through an expressive choreography of designers, photographers, stylists, models, and many others. Together, they reveal fashion photography as a dynamic, evolving form that crafts future histories.

Fashion_The Image will open to the public on February 28 and will run until May 30 at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.

See link in bio for more information.

Image:
Title: Utopia
Date: March 2023
Photographer: Tatenda Chidora
Designer: Nao Serati

Lesela as Calico Workshop Series are part of AFRI’s ongoing effort to move decolonial theory into practice. Referencing the Sesotho and Swahili word for cloth, the Lesela as Calico workshop Series centre indigenous African textiles as sites of innovation, challenging colonial perceptions of material, value, process work and design. Our patternmaking workshops are curated as a periodical – a three-part in real life series facilitated over three months – taking place on the last Saturday of every month.

African systems of communication and knowledge production extend beyond written formats. Practices such as Okukomaga show how knowledge is passed down through oral histories, embodied practice, and time. Recognising that learning through reading alone is inherently colonial, this workshop rethinks the book review whilst simultaneously critiquing fashion education's prevalence of coloniality: in the implied ‘universality’ of Western taste and aesthetics, the standardising of sizing, the labelling of body types, and the engineering of clothing through the metric pattern system. As such we look to alternative sewing pattern publications and approaches to making clothing with Pattern Magic II written by Tomoko Nakamichi as our first publication being reviewed over the next three months.

Led by Lesiba Mabitsela of , alongside Uganda fashion designer and artist, Mwami Murungi of , the workshop will be a collective, hands-on process and invites participants from fashion, visual arts and architecture to think and create with their hands and engage with alternative pattern drafting methods, contributing to the development of a decolonised African clothing aesthetic.

This intimate engagement only has space for 10 participants so sign up!
Fill out the form to secure your spot (Link in bio).

Introductory Session: 18 February 2026
Online Meeting via Zoom
18h00-20h00 EAT

Session 1: 28 February 2026
Xenson Art Space, Kamwokya, Kampala
11:00–17:00 EAT

PatternMagic II is curated as part of AFRI-Lab's Lesela as Calico Workshop Series and is supported by the British Council as part of its Creative DNA Programme 2026.

New Patterns Workbook #1: Fashioning Histories is not a textbook
But a site of activation.

Developed through workshops, field research and collective experimentation, the workbook offers a practice-led approach to fashion education that begins with people, objects, memory and place. Participants are invited to work with photographs, sound, material fragments and personal histories — not as references to be decoded, but as archives already in motion.

Rather than delivering fixed content, the workbook creates conditions for reflection, making and circulation. It supports facilitators, students and collectives to adapt activities to their own contexts, while remaining accountable to the communities, materials and histories that shape the work.

Designed for workshops, classrooms, collectives and self-led study, the workbook encourages flexible use, local translation and ethical citation.

To learn more about the New Patterns workbooks or to enquire about access and future activations, google form 🔗 in bio

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New Patterns Team
Workbook / project graphic design: Nontokozo Tshabalala
Project coordination: Ziyander Mute
Website development: Dumisani Jere

New Patterns — Closing the Fold
Supported by the National Arts Council
Presented by the African Fashion Research Institute

As New Patterns moves toward publication, our attention turns to the materials at its core — the New Patterns Workbooks, shaped through three years of field research, making, and pedagogical experiments across South Africa.

This weekend, AFRI will be in Standerton with the Creatives Shall Govern Collective to test and refine Workbook #1: Fashioning Histories. This is a closed, community-based workshop designed to gather feedback, dialogue, and insights as we continue to move toward the publication.

Fashioning Histories draws on non-formal learning traditions and emerged from the STYLES of SOUND Lab in Daveyton. Across Year 1 and Year 2 of the programme — including Durban, Mapungubwe, Daveyton, and key material-feedback sessions in Bloemfontein, Kimberley and Cape Town — each site has helped us deepen the curriculum and ground it in lived experience.
Our aim is to build decolonial fashion education tools that can travel, adapt, and live within different communities.

If you’d like to follow the workbook’s journey toward publication sign up via the link in our bio.

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New Patterns — Closing the Fold is supported by the National Arts Council and presented by the African Fashion Research Institute.

Before New Patterns was a curriculum, it was a shared question: how else might we learn fashion?

When the proposal formed in 2023, it drew on years of collective experiment: Daveyton, Mapungubwe, The Fold and countless field notes. These activations were more than workshops; they were pedagogical rehearsals: informal yet methodical forms of knowledge exchange.

Drawing on non-formal education — learning that happens between the mother’s hand and the classroom — AFRI shaped practices that are structured, rigorous and rooted in lived experience. New Patterns weaves these lessons into a replicable framework for decolonial design learning.

This is not the beginning. It is a continuation.
Stay close as we close the fold. Subscribe to our newsletter.



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New Patterns — Closing the Fold; a 3-year artistic programme using fashion-led research supported by the National Arts Council and presented by the African Fashion Research Institute.

🗞️ In this week's Newsletter:

📚 Internship/returnship opportunities.

🏆 Our co-founder Lesiba Mabitsela is off to Linz, Austria to accept the S+T+ARTS Prize merit award for the two-part digital installation, The Founders Pillars & The Power Loom, conceptualised in collaboration with and .

🏛️ Fashion in Museums Symposium at Museum Africa launches to the public.

✅ See our link in bio to read and subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest news and updates from AFRI.