Fashion in Museums Symposium

On 6 September 2025, Museum Africa will host the Fashion in Museums Symposium, a one-day programme convened by the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) to coincide with the closing of the exhibition Fashion Accounts in Museum Africa. The symposium will foreground contemporary creative methodologies and radical strategies for curating African fashion in museum contexts.

Speakers and contributors include Khaya Mchunu, Kiara Gounder, Pierre-Antoine Vetterello, Lethabo Xulu, Bongani Tau, Duduzile Mathebula, Melusi Masike, Erica de Greef, Alison Moloney, and Wanda Lephoto, who will be in conversation with Sindiso Khumalo and Mcumisa Duma, as well as Motsane Seabela.

The programme will feature roundtables, paper presentations, film screenings, and a curator-led walkabout of Fashion Accounts in Museum Africa. Key questions include how curatorial practices can intervene, rewrite and reshape fashion narratives on and from the continent, and how designers, film-makers and curators might restore lineages of fashion that reflect indigenous meaning-systems, black urban experiences, and Afrocentric maker-histories.

“It is in the gaps, the absences, and the fragments of fashion in museum collections that we need to look to find ourselves when our stories are not acknowledged in the record,” co-curator Wanda Lephoto said. Fellow co-curator Dr Erica de Greef said, “We are curious to explore visual, spatial, sonic and cultural strategies that offer pathways towards rethinking archives and their gaps in relation to decolonial futures.”

The exhibition Fashion Accounts in Museum Africa (November 2024–September 2025) presented installations with new commissions by The Sartists and Mimi Duma, alongside works by Thebe Magugu and Sindiso Khumalo. As co-curator Alison Moloney explains, “The exhibition addresses the legacies of colonial museum practices and is both an account of fashion practices, historic and contemporary, which represent resistance and liberation, and a stage to hold fashion to account as a tool of colonialism.”

Designers, curators, academics, fashion students, and researchers from South Africa and beyond are invited to attend free of charge, but should RSVP.

• RSVP to attend here
• Download the press release here
• Access the programme here

The event is supported by the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS).