Interview:
Intellect Books & Journals in Conversation with Erica de Greef & Lesiba Mabitsela
Our co-founders, Dr. Erica de Greef and Lesiba Mabitsela, recently dropped by Intellect Books & Journals’ In Conversation podcast for a chat with host James Campbell. They unpacked their contributed chapter, "Dressing Rituals: Writing South African Men’s Fashion as a Site of Decolonial Practice," featured in the Intellect Handbook of Men’s Fashion Studies.
Exhibition: Fashion_The Image
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. 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 was open to the public from February 28th till May 30the 2026 at the Roger Ballen Centre for Photography and Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.
Research: The Founders Pillars & The Power Loom
The Fovnder’s Pillars & The Power Loom is an Augmented Reality (AR) memorial and smart fabric visualisation honouring the six enslaved individuals once owned by MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) founder William Barton Rogers. Drawing from six African regions, each represented by a distinct textile and its associated myth/story, the project, conceptualised by Meghna Singh, Lesiba Mabitsela and Simon Wood, weaves decolonial tropes and tales of freedom-making practices into AI-generated magical imaginings that fuse classical colonial architecture with African futuristic storytelling.
Resource: African Fashion (?) Online Course
African Fashion (?) is an online, discursive course designed to invite engagement in debates and provocations both as a group and individually. The course offered by the African Fashion Research Institute explores why African fashion stereotypes exist and persist, welcoming an online exchange to collectively query the concept of African Fashion(?). Co-convened by Dr Erica de Greef and Dr heeten bhagat, this course is designed to invite participants to contribute to a series of debates – seemingly simple and superficial – with the purpose of troubling existing and stubborn ideas about fashion from the continent. Enrollment for the first cohort of 2026 is now open!