LUSAKA, ZAMBIA – Designer Kaajal Vaghela emerges from a hallway leading to the main area of business in her family’s shop, the City Clothing Factory, in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.
The factory has designed, produced and sold uniforms for school and work for more than 50 years. But today this factory is also churning out a new kind of uniform. Vaghela designs apparel for Zambia’s fashion-conscious urban-dwellers, focusing on corporate wear and blazers.
Vaghela always knew she would be a designer, she says.
“Because I’ve kind of grown up in the factory all my life, I kind of knew I was going to come back to it anyway,” she says.
After studying fashion in London, England, she returned to Lusaka and noticed changes in young Zambians’ lifestyles.
“I noticed changes in life here,” she says. “I noticed a lot more women going to work.”
Blazers were a natural fit for young Zambians’ needs and her own imagination and tailoring talents, she says.
“I’ve always loved blazers,” she says, adding that her grandfather’s tailored suits and her father’s safari jackets both made a mark on her growing up.
Vaghela realized that for women newly entering the workforce, a smart, stylish blazer could embody power, as it could give them the confidence that they were really going to work.
She established her own business, KC Vaghela Fashions, in 2009. Today, her jackets retail for about 1,000 Zambian kwacha ($185). She sells them online, through fashion shows and at City Clothing Factory.
Local designers are emerging who want to add more vibrancy to Zambian fashion by marrying traditional concepts with modern designs. They also employ traditional “chitenge” fabric to promote national identity and pride, which consumers say is expanding their clothing options. Economists and designers are optimistic about the fashion industry’s ability to energize the economy. But designers worry that cheap imported clothing could kill their market, encouraging consumers to buy local goods and young people to consider careers in fashion.
Local designers are blending traditional styles with modern needs with the goal of producing attractive, unique and useful apparel.
In the past, men wore suits to church and other public outings, but eventually people preferred simple, casual clothes such as T-shirts and jeans to the formal, tailored look, Vaghela says. Now she is trying to bring back the old-school, classic vibe of the 1950s and 1960s and to update them with bright colors and patterns.
With KC Vaghela Fashions, she aims to create designs that are elegant, current and serve the lifestyle needs of her customers while retaining the Zambian dressing identity, she says.
“What I am trying to do is make it into such nice fabric that you can wear it with black trousers and go to work,” she says, “but then straight after, especially with this fast society that we are living in, you are not going to go home. You are probably going to go out for dinner or straight out for drinks.”
Vaghela wants her customers to be able to wear her blazers night or day, she says.
“You can just change your black trousers for jeans – it still works,” she says. “So that’s what I am trying to incorporate with my brand.”
She named her new collection Element because it captures something essential about her, her home and her customers, she says.
“When I say ‘Element,’” she says, “it’s because now that I’ve come back to Zambia, I am working with something that I’ve always known and taking in the changes.”
The word captures the feeling she hopes her customers have while wearing her clothes, she says.
“When you are in your element, you are going to have color,” she says. “When you are in your element, you are brightest, you are happy. So that’s where my collection come[s] from.”
Vaghela’s current collection also uses another element of Zambian culture: chitenge.
Chitenge is a light fabric that features colorful prints, and people often wear it as a symbol of decency and respect. Women can wear a chitenge as a wrap over Western clothes or when in the presence of in-laws, use it as a sling for babies, or tailor the fabric into a full outfit. People traditionally wear chitenge to kitchen parties, the local term for traditional bridal showers.
Vaghela uses chitenge in order to have a more positive impact on the Zambian culture, she says.
“Chitenge fabric is our backbone,” she says.
She wants the modern chitenge look to be Zambia’s signature.
Although chitenge or similar fabrics are common in other African countries, people traditionally have worn it from head to toe. Lusaka designers join an international class of designers striving to create unique apparel by blending it with other fabrics and creating modern styles. They may add patches of chitenge to other fabrics or fashion it into minidresses, skirts, shirts and handbags.
“What I am trying to push is our own fashion, our own designs, our own something, something that we can hold on to,” Vaghela says. “Chitenge fabric is there, but we need to do something more with it.”
Designer Towani Clarke launched in 2013 Kutowa Designs, which also merges chitenge fabric with Western cuts and other Zambian local fabrics. Designers want to make something new, which customers also want, she says.
Customers have received Clarke’s modern dresses and tops well, she says. Producing these designs also generates a sense of local pride for her.
“There is a pride aspect, being Zambian and something related to our culture,” she says.
Fashion consumers, such as Precious Imasiku, a government worker at the Ministry of Defence, say they appreciate the stylish new offerings in Zambia.
Imasiku mainly wears suits to work and is enjoying finding many fashion options, both traditional and modern, to choose from these days, she says.
“Even chitenge is nice, especially for kitchen parties and church,” she says, “and there are a lot of designs now, and it’s decent!”
Local designers also add value to the economy by contributing to local employment, an economist within Zambia’s Ministry of Commerce Trade and Industry says. The source declined to publish his name for fear of reprimand for not following protocol for speaking with reporters.
The benefits of a robust fashion sector extend beyond just dress and textile shops and into other industries that complement dressmaking, such as shoe shops, or that support it, such as thread companies and press-stud businesses, he says.
“These businesses do not make their money through individual sales,” he says. “For example, those who sell buttons and press studs that are used to decorate the designs, they rely on volumes of [sales], and these come from designers and tailoring shops. So the more designs are made, the higher the incomes.”
Students of fashion and other disciplines are using international experience to develop their industries locally, Vaghela says.
“Because of the global recession, I’ve noticed that a lot of students have gone and studied in the West, then come back,” she says. “They’re bringing in new skills.”
She anticipates that these global citizens will energize the local economy.
“There’s plenty of space for job creation,” she says. “There is a team of entrepreneurs growing – very young entrepreneurs. Give them 20 years, they will be owning big businesses.”
The Zambian economy needs people with creative ideas, she says.
But designers worry about the simultaneous influx of cheap foreign clothes into the country.
Imported clothes flood the Zambian markets, including imported secondhand clothes, which vendors price cheaply and compete with local products.
These imports may hinder entrepreneurship and the local fashion industry’s potential to grow the economy, Vaghela says.
Clarke shares Vaghela’s concerns about the cost of production and the competition with foreign clothes, which are cheap in price as well as quality, she says. Even though the new Zambian designs are beautiful and can contribute to job creation, many Zambians still wear imported clothes. This means that Zambians send billions of kwacha abroad.
Both designers say more Zambians need to embrace local designs, even if they cost more.
Clothes are expensive to produce locally, given the high cost of labor, space and imported materials, Clarke says. Zambians have to import even textiles, including chitenge, from West African countries with more developed weaving industries.
“We are not a nation of weavers,” she says.
Because of the cost of making clothes locally, they are more expensive to purchase compared with finished clothes imported from such countries as China.
The government should offer more economic incentives for local designers and higher taxes on those who import finished products, Clarke says.
Some Zambian clothing shop owners still opt for imported clothes and are skeptical about chitenge’s potential with consumers.
For example, Sharon Sulumba, a saleswoman at a clothing shop called Pasqueen in Lusaka, says the store’s owner buys clothes from South Africa to meet local fashion demands.
The days when people regularly wore traditional chitenge outfits are gone, Sulumba says. Nowadays, people even wear modern outfits to traditional cultural events such as kitchen parties.
“Women don’t like those traditional chitenge dresses,” she says. “When you put on those, people will laugh at you.”
The country needs to move with the times, she says. The Internet exposes consumers to fashion from abroad.
“Things have changed, so even clothes and fashion must change,” she says.
Vaghela agrees, saying an important influence comes from the United States and the Western world. She notes that her designs have that Western touch too but emphasizes that the fabrics are still African.
Despite the threats from ideas and clothing imported from abroad, Clarke is optimistic about fashion’s future in Zambia.
“I produce out of madness and the hope that it will get better,” she says. “It’s madness because I love doing it.”
Vaghela encourages other young people to consider fashion as a career choice.
“I remember back when I said I wanted to go and study fashion, my mom looked at me like, ‘Are you nuts?’” she says. “But now it’s become a normal thing. And I want to push that.”
