'African fashion is multifarious and cannot be defined': Interview with Christine Checinska, lead curator of 'Africa Fashion'

Christine Checinska at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, March 30, 2026. LÉO DELAFONTAINE / MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY-JACQUES-CHIRAC

Christine Checinska, lead curator of the "Africa Fashion" exhibition currently on display at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, is also the senior curator for African and African Diaspora Fashion and Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Is it limiting to speak of "African fashion"?

The title of the exhibition is "Africa Fashion," not "African fashion," because we wanted to subtly mark the fact that African fashions can look like many different things, and we could never showcase fashions from across the entire continent. All we hoped to do was to give a glimpse. We took almost the corners of the continent: We had designs from Morocco to South Africa, from Ghana to Eswatini, to try and blur those old colonial boundaries. But also, again, to keep emphasizing that this is a complex topic. [African fashion is] multifarious, it's rich, it's inspiring, all of those things. And it's something that cannot be defined.

How did you approach such a rich topic?