Worldmaking through Collaborative Craft: Community-Based Fashion Practices in Kampala

Abstract

This article examines how community-based fashion practices in Kampala generate fashion languages through material recomposition, naming, participatory pedagogy, and repair. Focusing on Seamline Atelier’s Suubi Collection and Sanvra’s Olugoye Lwo, it approaches both initiatives as situated practices that produce meaning through garments, words, materials, and public encounters. Seamline Atelier reworks worn school uniforms into craftivist garments that address education, aspiration, memory, and youth futures, drawing on the lived experience of

Suubi Solomon and spoken-word collaboration with Geof d’Poet. Sanvra transforms pre-consumer textile waste into wearable art that foregrounds Luganda language, Ugandan craftsmanship, ecological responsibility, and community engagement, extending fashion into community-based environmental pedagogy and practices of reuse. Drawing on studio visits in Kampala, exhibition observation at Kwetu Kwanza during the Nyege Nyege Festival in Jinja, documented conversations, and the co-conceptualization of hybrid symposium formats for WORLDMAKING MATTERS. Sustainable Fashion, Design and Arts in Salzburg, the article analyses how these practices speak from lived realities often excluded from dominant fashion discourse. 

It argues that fashion languages emerge through material afterlives, local naming, storytelling, participatory formats, and repair, challenging abstract sustainability claims and Global North-centred narratives of fashion innovation. By foregrounding Kampala-based practices as sites of knowledge formation, the article contributes to debates on fashion discourse, sustainability, and decolonial design. It proposes fashion as a pluriversal communicative ecology grounded in collaboration, care, and material responsibility, positioning worldmaking as a practice enacted through situated fashion languages.