Join us for the second edition of the Vogue Business Sustainability Forum on 28 April.
Designer Bobby Kolade has worked for Balenciaga and founded an eponymous label with a studio in Berlin. For his next act, he’s returned to Uganda, where he was raised, and is creating a new brand that could change the meaning of circular fashion.
Buzigahill launched on 27 April as a clothing brand “with a mission to return Uganda‘s textile industry to the peak levels of the early 1970s, when more cotton was processed than exported”. Its first project, Return to Sender, takes clothes bought from the secondhand market in Uganda and redesigns them, with an upcycled aesthetic, into new garments sold to markets in the Global North.
“We work with secondhand clothes, repurpose them and give them new life, new identity,” says Kolade. “We’re sending the clothes back to where they came from, but we’ve imbued a Ugandan identity onto these pieces.”
Kolade is targeting customers in countries including the US, the UK and South Korea — that’s where the clothing the collection was sourced from originated. Buzigahill, which is self-funded, is launching with an online, direct-to-consumer store, although down the line Kolade hopes to get into certain retail stores that align with his concept and purpose. There’s little precedent for a label like his, but Kolade, who moved to Uganda’s capital Kampala after working in fashion in Europe for years where his eponymous label was a finalist for the Woolmark Prize in 2015, is clear-eyed about what he’s setting out to do and where he wants to take the brand in the future. And he believes the world is ready for it.
“Return to Sender is a conversation between the Global North and the Global South, and maybe also about some future-oriented design thinking or production thinking,” he says. He moved to Kampala in 2018 with the intent of building a brand using sustainable practices and Ugandan cotton, but the research he put in over the next few years revealed the country’s textile industry couldn’t support that concept, he says, as the cotton processing and textile production facilities just didn’t exist anymore. That’s how he arrived at the idea of using secondhand clothes as the starting material. “To produce a collection that can compete in a global market, there was no other option other than working on secondhand clothes. And it seemed like the right thing to do to talk about what it’s like for a designer who’s trying to create a Ugandan product for a global market.”
The launch sheds light on the impacts of the global secondhand clothing trade on local economies and environments in countries across the Global South. For decades, thrift stores and clothing charities in wealthy countries have sold surplus inventory to the global secondhand market. Now, as more brands and retailers offer take-back, the flow of baled used garments into countries across Africa, Asia, South America and eastern Europe has surged. The market in Accra, Ghana’s capital, handles 100 million items in a typical four-month period, according to the nonprofit OR Foundation, equivalent to what Thredup says it’s recirculated in over a decade.
Many sustainability advocates, local designers and residents say this trade has devastated their regional textile industries, contributed to health problems for people working in the secondhand markets, helped accelerate the decline of traditional clothing and overloaded communities with waste they don’t have the capacity or infrastructure to manage properly. Critics say the growing global interest in keeping clothes out of landfills is great, but only if it applies to all landfills — not only those in the Global North.
The first Return to Sender drop combines simplicity, comfort and individuality into one collection: mismatched T-shirts with exterior seams, men’s suits transformed in tailcoat jackets, button-down shirts and baggy pants: Return to Sender prices range from $195 to T-shirts to $215 for hoodies to $530 for coats. Kolade says the process of creating these items — with his team of six who design and produce in their Kampala studio — is entirely different from traditional clothing design.
“We don’t work the way I used to work in Paris or Berlin. It’s really what we find inside these bales that informs the design process and the final product,” he says. That comes with significant challenges, but is also “liberating” by allowing him to be truer to his core values as a designer. “At the end of the day, I think it suits my personal ideal of design, which is to be really flexible and playful — and also colourful. Let’s be honest, there’s a lot of patchwork going on in this collection. I like that, and also to just let go of this idea of perfection, which I chased for so many years in Europe.”
While he is deliberately trying to send a message with the brand, it’s also an effort that aligns with his original purpose in moving back to Kampala, where he grew up (he was born in Sudan to German and Nigerian parents, and grew up in Kampala before moving to Berlin as a teenager) — to help revive Uganda’s once thriving textile sector.
“Secondhand clothes are generally seen as something quite negative. Is there a way we can add value to those clothes and build industry, or rebuild industry, here,” he says. “We’re trying to say, we can do more here than just consume your waste. We’re creative, we’re resourceful, and by purchasing this item you are helping to build an industry that your industries have not quite contributed to the development of.”
Buzigahill plans to collaborate on further projects with artists, designers, secondhand clothing vendors and artisanal workshops “to add value to local supply chains” and grow and strengthen creative industries in Uganda. The target market is consumers in countries where the bales used in his debut collection first initiated; those bales included men’s suits from the UK, silk scarves from South Korea, shirts from Germany and T-shirts from the US and Canada. “For now, those are the areas we’re targeting. Because of Return to Sender — they are the senders,” he says. “We’re not pointing fingers at anyone. We’re really inviting people to start a conversation with us.”
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