Artistic Director, Experience Designer Diane Akpovwa
Fashion Show Experience, 2025
Access Africa Couture
At Access Africa Couture, we firmly place our collections within a larger African textile tradition, reviving archives and centering community.
Our early fashion shows were held in community bookstores to establish textiles as a cultural archival practice and an anthropological device for outlining Afro-diasporic futures.
Our first show was held at For Keeps Bookstore, a community space that seeks to provide access to rare and archival text to the larger population of Atlanta. Our missions unite in building interethnic intimacy and bridging knowledge gaps in culture through unorthodox educational resources.
In the curatorial spirit of representing Africa's past and future, this fashion show featured a vignette celebrating the cultural richness of African fashion and expression from the 50s and the 20th century at large, positioning our fashion show in a continued dialogue and tradition of cultural expansion through garments and physical presentation.
Cultural Immersion meets Experience Design in this Fashion Show, where event-goers become active stakeholders through participatory audience engagement tactics, such as "spraying money," a Nigerian tradition commonly used for weddings and celebrations.
From styling to set design, I worked with a small team of 4 to create a fashion show experience that pushes new ideas of contemporary African identity forward through intentional Art Direction and Spatial Design.