How China’s Belt And Road Is Shaping Fashion In Africa
New research tracks how garments made in China reflect rising influence and resistance across the Global South.
China’s growing influence in Africa is being stitched into the fabric of daily life, quite literally through fashion. A new research project is investigating how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is reshaping power dynamics across the Global South by tracking the flow of fashion products from China to African markets.
Focusing on trade routes connecting Guangdong, Nairobi, and Maputo, the study explores how fashion is designed, produced, traded, and consumed in South-South networks. It examines how everyday clothing items made in China for African consumers reflect deeper dynamics of cross-cultural exchange, economic dependency, and geopolitical influence.
The project asks key questions: How are Chinese-designed garments tailored for African tastes? How do Chinese and African actors assign value and negotiate trade? How are cultural differences managed in the fashion marketplace? And what meanings or limitations do African consumers attach to these goods?
Using a multi-sited, multidisciplinary approach, the researchers are combining ethnographic fieldwork, visual and semiotic analysis, interviews, and wardrobe studies to follow garments across their full journey from design tables in China to wardrobes in Kenya and Mozambique.
The project’s contribution is threefold: It challenges Western-centric views of global trade and power, introduces innovative methods to study fashion as a tool of soft power, and provides empirical insight into how Chinese-African fashion ties are reshaping lives in an era of rising globalisation, digitalisation, and consumerism.
Far beyond aesthetics, the study argues, fashion in this context is a powerful expression of who holds influence and who resists it.
