BUZIGAHILL Fall/Winter 2026 / FW26 For Intervention At Berlin Fashion Week entitled RETURN TO SENDER 12
When millennial East Africans look through photos of their grandparents in their younger years, dancing on a parquet floor, posing in front of a Citroën or a Beetle parked next to a brilliant bougainvillea bush, why do our eyes soften with nostalgia? What is it about that wooden floor, their natural hair and the flared leg that make us smile, as if we long to relive the liberation of post-independence promise?
Uganda gained independence in October 1962; Kenya in December 1963. What followed was a period during which visionary Ugandan playwright Robert Serumaga toured the world with his abstract plays, and prolific Kenyan author Ngũgĩ Wa Thiongo’s A River Between was published. A time when textile factories in both nations were thriving, albeit under ownership and management of East African Indians.
Our grandparents’ fashion might not have been entirely local. The Citroën and Beetle certainly weren’t. The architecture, though tropical and modern, wasn’t African per se either. But there is a sense of freedom in their stance. A sense of building and reclamation in the setting. Advancement. Characterised by wide collars and bell-bottoms from the west, their fashion, void of modern logos, sits snugly on their triumphant shoulders.
BUZIGAHILL FW26 / Fall/Winter 2026, RETURN TO SENDER 12 revisits the promise of the 60s and 70s in East Africa. The ownership. We cross the border eastwards to Kenya, where containers of second-hand clothes headed for Uganda are offloaded at the port of Mombasa. The collection creates links between our grandparents and contemporary fashion rebels such as boda boda riders, who, through highly individualistic and pragmatic alterations, reinvent second-hand clothes imported from the Global North, radically localising them to make them their own.
All images BUZIGAHILL FW26 / Fall/Winter 2026 by the brand. Credits Images to Finnegan Koichi Godenschweger and Harry Miller for Buzigahill. PR Agency Reference Studio.