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Q&A: IGC Fashion uses neglected materials to create garments and community

by | Jun 28, 2024

IGC Fashion was founded by two Ugandan designers, Kasoma Ibrahim and Katende Godfrey. The duo creates clothes that go beyond fashion, using them as a vehicle to spark discussions about topics such as their cultures, craftsmanship, and sustainability. Unwanted fabrics and raw materials are combined and transformed into unique pieces with a sustainable and zero-waste ethos at their core.

Beyond their garments, the team at IGC Fashion (Ibraham and Godfrey’s Community Fashion) hosts workshops and a monthly Fashion Cypher event, where fashion designers volunteer to share their expertise with the community at no cost.

IGC Fashion

What is IGC Fashion?

IGC is a fashion label based out of Kampala, Uganda that weaves imagined scenarios of ancient African history and traditions into modern aesthetics. Meticulously hand-crafted, IGC garments are not only moving, breathing pieces of sculptural art, but they are physical embodiments of unwritten histories.

Beyond fashion, IGC is a creative conglomerate dedicated to preserving and enhancing the well-being of the environment, culture, and society, through events, educational programmes and campaigns.

What role are you playing in shaping a more conscious and sustainable fashion system?

Slowly but surely, we are creating more infrastructure for a sustainable fashion system in Uganda and the world at large. What started as the Fashion Cypher programme, an IGC-led scheme which has been disseminating free sustainable fashion workshops to marginalised communities around Uganda for the last seven years, has suddenly grown into so much more.

We now host an annual event called Kwetu Kwanza—meaning ‘ours first’ or ‘our planet first’—to bring thought leaders, industry experts and the public together, to discuss and advocate for climate justice. In the last year, we began hosting a quarterly series of networking events for creatives in the sustainability sector. Most exciting of all however, is the upcoming launch of our Fashion Cypher residency space dedicated to teaching about environmental, cultural and social sustainability, or what we like to term ‘afro-sustainability’.

We look forward to using this space to invite students of the Fashion Cypher programme, along with fashion and climate experts from around the world, to share and create tangible solutions to global issues.

IGC Fashion is not your typical streetwear brand. What makes you identify as a streetwear brand?

Our ready-to-wear items are typically defined as streetwear because of the shapes and the way that they move. Design is a form of self-expression and having been a breakdancer and within the breaking community for much of our lives, we regard movement and how clothes embody and identify us, as a huge factor in their design. But while movement is at the heart of all our garments, our inspirations for designs can vary. Perhaps most obvious in our costumes, the majority of our inspiration is gained from African heritage and in the stories we hear of our ancestors and culture, from family, from books, music, dance and beyond.

IGC Fashion at the 2023 Kwetu Kwanza event

Tell us about the Gugumuka collection.

Gugumuka is a call-to-action Luganda word meaning ‘wake up’. The collection was inspired by the stigma around the lubugo fabric within Uganda society due to its untold history and miseducation around it. This fabric, made out of the bark of a tree and sometimes referred to as ‘barkcloth’, has been an integral part of the Baganda culture identity in Uganda. Demonised and erased under colonial rule, lubugo and other such items and symbols of culture and tradition in Uganda have contributed to local and global ignorance surrounding African culture, history and tradition. Gugumuka invites audiences to ‘wake up’ and engage with their history and their roots.

You combine upcycling with traditional materials such as cowrie shells and lubugo. Why?

Put simply, there is a deep connection between the preservation of culture and the environment. Using indigenous natural materials and upcycled materials we honour tradition and ancestral knowledge as the ultimate tool for sustainability.

Why is fabric choice so critical to your brand?

Connected to those who lived before us, we actually gain inspiration for the design of garments through the materials themselves. Hence why we are acutely aware of what materials we use, what historical value lies within them and the meaning conveyed in wearing them. Using indigenous materials such as lubugo, buso and kutiya, we practice cultural preservation and encourage others to do so too and tap into our inner truths.

This personal connection with the materials is as relevant a factor in ‘slow’ fashion as all the work we do to ensure the work is fully sustainable, such as materials, techniques and tailors assisting.

When upcycling materials we specifically choose to work with old materials and old garments to bring life to a new IGC piece, because we see purpose in reusing materials. Many second-hand vendors in Owino Market (the largest second-hand market in Uganda) deem most of the old pieces unfit for the market. They think those pieces wouldn’t sell and these ‘mistaken fabrics’ end up dumped.

We select these pieces, dismantle them and create IGC garments out of them. This helps us reduce waste coming out of the market, and also reduces all the impacts that can come when these garments and materials are not sold.

Tell us about the Fashion Cypher programme.

One initiative IGC founded and currently directs is the Fashion Cypher programme. Primarily, this is a grassroots community outreach project which targets marginalised communities around Uganda, equipping them with income-generating knowledge and skills surrounding craftsmanship, sustainable fashion and more. We have been facilitating these workshops and seeing tremendous results, economic stability, new business ventures, a rise in self-confidence of participants and new teachers and community leaders.

We are thrilled that in the coming months we will be opening a fashion residency specifically associated with the Fashion Cypher programme in Kampala, to turn these workshops into courses and incubation zones. In the coming months we will start inviting students from the Fashion Cypher cohort, and interns, students, teachers and experts from around the country and world, to share their knowledge. We hope this can nurture and uplift all who are fighting for the better of our planet and society through fashion.

IGC Fashion

What are your three top sustainable living tips?

  • Learning about culture, history and heritage—the answers are in the past.
  • Seeing value in reusing and fixing what you already have.
  • Maintaining a close relationship to the earth—consciously living in harmony with nature.

Who or what inspires you?

I create without preconceptions or inspirations, without attachments. If anything, research for my work comes from history books, old stories, artefacts and music. In other regards, my garments are derived from my connection to the body, movement and my current environment or present moment.

If you could change one thing in the fashion industry, today, what would it be?

I would like to see more authenticity in the fashion industry. If fashion were a form of self-expression it would automatically catalyse the demise of fast fashion and preserve cultures around the world.

 

  • To learn more about IGC Fashion, check out their website and follow them on Instagram at @igc_fashion.
  • All images supplied by IGC Fashion.
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