Road to #AFICapetownFashionWeek - Globe Roundabout Shoot

Every fashion week counts. For this campaign, it was important to situate ourselves. Hell’s Gate gorge and Lake Naivasha served to put our narrative in a historical, philosophical and metaphoric frame. But after exploring where we are from and where we are going, it was important to think about where we are. Geography is usually the best place to begin.

The broad theme for AFI’s Fashion week was the concept of Journey and journeying. This merged smoothly with our future-looking introspection – it became a bi-dimensional exploration of space and time. If you think about the current time – its pace, its energy and its intensity – and try to find its corresponding coordinates on a map, you find Nairobi, and more specifically, Nairobi’s CBD and even more precisely, the Globe roundabout. Globe is the coronary artery of Nairobi. Traffic, humanity, angst, enterprise – everything rushes into the heart of Nairobi with incredible gusto via the roundabout. Even when there’s heavy traffic and everything is halted, you can still feel the throbbing undercurrents, the impatience to get it on, the intent, the grit and the tenacity of the city.

We wanted to capture this electricity. We shot several scenes at the roundabout and then, naturally, took a matatu. The matatu is recognizably Nairobian, a feature of the city and a symbol of Kenyan life. Matatus are as unruly and as lawless as high fashion. They zigzag through the city, disrupting order and congruity but in this entropy, a system emerges. Just as in innovative fashion, new paths, new outlooks and new formats are created. They make us respond to them and adjust how we move through life to accommodate them and because of both, we become more attuned, more spontaneous and free.

Here are a few of our favorite scenes from this shoot.

After Globe, we will be looking back at the shoot at our Studio in Kiambu. Leave a comment below or follow us on Instagram to be part of the conversation