On sustainable fashion, the Ethi Ecos philosophy, Africa’s squandered textile wealth, and the place where climate resilience, poverty alleviation and creative economy finally find each other.
Last week I had the privilege of sitting with Shaldon Kopman, Creative Director of Naked Ape – an impromptu masterclass ensued that left me wrestling with a question I am still trying to unpack.
Shaldon has spent fifteen years building a brand on a principle most of the fashion industry is only starting to explore: biodegradable textiles, wool, linen, silks, bamboo, hemp, cotton, and slow fashion that makes garments intended to last for years, not seasons. His mantra, Ethi Ecos, Ethical, Ecological, Economical, is not a marketing slogan. It is the structural logic of the entire enterprise. No compromise in fabrication. No compromise in tailoring or finishing. No waste.
It is a beautiful philosophy. And when you sit inside it for an afternoon, it reorders your thinking about every purchase you make going forward.
But it also surfaced a tension I could not easily resolve. Because I am a deliberate and committed supporter of African designers, Ntozinhle, Stoned Cherrie, Amanda Laird Cherry, Needlepoint, Leigh Schubert, ZantaAdeyde to name a few, I have always understood that intentionality as an act of economic solidarity. Keeping money, craft and jobs inside the continent. Choosing cultural identity over convenience. Supporting the designers who built a visual language for post-apartheid South Africa at a time when the mainstream fashion industry barely reflected us.
What the conversation with Shaldon forced me to confront was a harder question: As an Afro-optimist and ESG and Sustainability Strategist, is my commitment to local job creation efforts, while laudable, costing me something in terms of my contribution to the climate resilience discourse? And what is it opportunity cost to the rest of the continent?
The dichotomy of the conscious wardrobe
The first thing worth saying is that the tension is more nuanced than it first appears. It is a well-researched fact that human prosperity achieved through job creation interventions, infrastructure investment and service delivery significantly contributes to reducing climate vulnerability. The annual UNDP Multidimensional Poverty Index attests to this. However, not all local garments are created equal, and not all local output is environmentally indifferent. Just to be clear, this essay is not an indictment on those that are not yet in the eco-conscious arena. As I said, economic prosperity is both a necessary and worthwhile pursuit, fully deserving of our unwavering support.
Although the voices are few, Naked Ape is not a lone crusader in this space. Amanda Laird Cherry is a case in point. The Durban-based designer, whose label has operated for more than two decades, won the Changemaker Award at the Twyg Sustainable Fashion Awards, recognised for their long-term commitment to reducing textile waste, upcycling, supporting local artisans, and using locally sourced fabrics. Her design philosophy is explicitly trans-seasonal: garments built to outlast trends, to be dressed up or down, to occupy a wardrobe for years rather than weeks. “Those who think of clothing in terms of this or next season’s fashion,” she has said, “are missing the point a little. The fabrics and cuts we wear tell us about our society.”
That is not so far from Shaldon Kopman’s philosophy. In fact, it rhymes with it. The difference lies in the materials: Naked Ape builds from the ground up with biodegradable fibres as a non-negotiable. Many other local designers, however locally made, however culturally intentional, are still working with fabric supply chains that include synthetics, blended fibres, and materials that will not biodegrade. More importantly, a number of what we know as “African prints” like seShoeshoe and Ankara prints are European or Asian in origin, which is a further appropriation of the African narrative.
Sustainable fashion, done with the rigour that Naked Ape applies to it, is expensive. Bespoke, biodegradable, ethically sourced and slow, these things carry a premium. This is not to say that premium well-executed brands should not be associated with Africa’s fashion. Deservedly, we have more of these top tier brands emerging across the continent with bold impact. However, it does mean that sometimes dressing with full environmental integrity can be a privilege. In a country where close to 60% of the population lives below the poverty line, that privilege falls unevenly, while the environmental consequences of mass consumption fall heaviest on the communities least able to absorb them.
That is the dichotomy I am wrestling with. But it is not, I firmly believe, an unsolvable one. It is, in fact the opportunity we need to lean into – to achieve economic growth, reducing unemployment alongside responding to climate risk impacts.
Hidden in plain sight
Africa grows cotton. Africa rears sheep and goats. Africa has indigenous plant life that can be converted into wearable and home decor textiles. Africa has ancient weaving traditions, and centuries-old natural dyeing techniques that produce colour from the land itself, without synthetic chemicals, without microplastic runoff, without the petrochemical inputs that make fast fashion so environmentally ruinous.
Ninety percent of Africa’s cotton is exported raw. It leaves the continent as a commodity and returns as a garment, made by someone else’s hands, generating someone else’s jobs, building someone else’s GDP. African consumers and institutions then pay a premium to import clothing made from African fibre, reinforcing a trade deficit that is, at its root, a value-chain deficit.
The Better Cotton Initiative reported in 2024 that an estimated 600% of value can be created in the African cotton value chain, from raw fibre, through spinning and twisting into yarn, weaving and knitting into fabric, and finally into dyeing, printing, designing and finished garment. Six hundred percent. That is the value that leaves Africa with every bale of raw cotton that boards a ship. That is the employment, the skills development, the industrial resilience, the tax revenue, the community income, foregone, shipment by shipment, season by season.
Africa’s textile and fashion market was valued at over $70.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $89 billion by 2029 as urbanisation accelerates and the middle classes grow. The question is not whether that market will grow. It will. The question is who captures the value. Whether African hands make African clothes for African bodies, or whether the continent continues to watch its raw materials sail away and its consumer spending flow outward.
Leadership coordination
This is not a conversation that individual designers and conscious consumers can resolve alone. The structural conditions that make sustainable local fashion expensive, and unsustainable imported fashion cheap, are the product of policy choices. And they can be unmade by policy choices.
Several African governments are beginning to understand this. By establishing industrial parks, introducing targeted tax relief, and enabling the development of farm-to-fashion value chains, governments in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Nigeria are beginning to use textile policy as an employment policy, driving youth and women into manufacturing roles that create income, skills and dignity at scale. The African Development Bank’s Fashionomics Africa programme has trained more than 7,000 fashion entrepreneurs, the majority of them women, in exactly this kind of value-chain thinking.
But the opportunity is far larger than job training programmes. The African Continental Free Trade Area, the AfCFTA, exists precisely to enable the kind of integrated, continent-spanning value chain that we need to unlock. Cotton grown in Mali. Spun in Ethiopia. Dyed across several West African nations. Woven in South Africa. Designed by a Johannesburg creative. Worn in Nairobi. Admired on a runway in Lagos. This is the Made in Africa vision pursued by the African Regional Standards Organisation (ARSO). The shortage of harmonised trade infrastructure to move people, funding and products that generate the most value is keeping our collective industrialisation efforts fragmented and vulnerable to external dictates.
The youth dividend
Young people under-25 account for over 50% of Africa’s total population. That is not a burden to be managed. It is the single greatest creative and productive resource on the planet, if we choose to invest in it with intention.
Young Africans are already building fashion brands, driving cultural narratives, and redefining what African identity looks like on a global stage. The continent’s rapid growth in digital infrastructure is facilitating intra-African collaboration and the emergence of young talent at a pace that was not possible a generation ago. There is a growing consumer trend across the continent for fashion Made in Africa, particularly among the young, that is creating demand at exactly the moment when the supply-side infrastructure needs to be built.
These creative industries, fashion, design, film, music, are particularly attractive to an interconnected generation eager to explore wider cultural frontiers. They bring African culture and creativity as a unique selling proposition. And they have the potential to serve simultaneously as economic engines, vehicles of regional integration, and expressions of a continental identity that is self-authored rather than externally defined.
Africa has always had the fabric
I left Shaldon Kopman’s beautifully curated space dressed the same way I arrived. But thinking very differently about what I was wearing, and why.
The question he opened up is not really about which designer to support or how much to spend on a garment. It is about what kind of relationship Africa chooses to have with its own resources, its own creativity, its own young people, and its own story.
Sustainable fashion, properly understood, is not a luxury product for the environmentally conscious elite. It is what happens when a continent decides to process its own textiles. To honour its own dyeing traditions. To employ its own youth across the full length of the value chain. To wear its own story rather than outsource the telling of it.
That is where climate resilience, poverty alleviation and sustainable development stop being separate conversations conducted in separate rooms, and become one integrated act of self-determination, human resilience and economic growth.