MAAME YAA

(Fall/Winter 23)

The MaameYaa Collection (A/W 23) is AJABENG’s debut womenswear collection inspired by African-American writer and curator Catherine E. McKinley’s work The African Lookbook. McKinley’s work delicately captures the dignity, elegance, and liveliness of African women in images taken throughout the last century.

This seminal work is a remarkable repository of African women’s rich and immersive visual history. The book tells a powerful story of African liberation and its impact on global fashion and photography, a theme that resonates with AJABENG’s birthing ethos and is explored in intimate detail with this collection.

The ‘Maame Yaa’ collection seeks to celebrate African women in their everyday beauty and to shine a light on the exceptionally rich visual history of women living on the continent. The collection seeks to properly situate and spotlight the contribution of African women to global fashion to remind the world that far from being lost, that history is documented and should be celebrated. This collection is a bold declaration of African women’s enduring strength, beauty, and power.