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TRACEY HADFIELD talks to Ghanaian designer, MINA EVANS, about her path into fashion, and how the African industry compares to the rest of the world.

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ina Evans is one of Africa’s best-known, up-and-coming designers, which is remarkable considering she’s only been running her own label for three years. I’m curious to know the secrets behind her runaway success, as I sit down to Skype the talented Ghanaian designer. After a few failed connections, thanks to less than perfect West African internet, I finally managed to get through to Mina’s busy studio in Accra.

MALL RAMP PHOTOGRAPHY SIMON DEINER / SDR PHOTO

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“I decided I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was about eight,” Mina tells me with a laugh, when I ask her when she first knew that fashion would be her path in life. With a father in architecture, Mina’s creative genes expressed themselves early on in her childhood. “I liked to draw a lot, and every time I was drawing, I’d notice that it was of clothes - stuff I saw people wear, and stuff I though was trendy. Once I found out [fashion] was something you could do as a living, I was just sold!”

Unlike most children, her dream didn’t change as she grew up, and after school she leapt at the opportunity to take an internship with veteran

Ghanaian designer, Kofi Ansah. She tells me about her time there with fondness in her softly-accented voice: “I was one of the studio assistants, helping with fittings, cutting, and just basically learning how to run a studio - I learned so much.”

It was in Kofi Ansah’s studio that Mina was first exposed to all the elements involved in making clothes ‘properly’, not just in terms of cutting and fitting, but in quality control as well. She was also introduced to the importance of customer relationships – something that would stand her in good stead in her own future career.

At the same time as she was interning, Mina knew she wanted to

I decided I wanted to be a fashion designer

when I was about eight. .

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study fashion formally, and she’d been looking around at various options after graduating from school. “Straight out of high school, everyone’s going to the States, and you want to go, you want to look,” she explains, “but then you see that the fees are… a bit too high…” We share a wry laugh at the trials and tribulations of coming from a country with a comparatively weak currency, but Mina doesn’t seem too upset about the way things turned out. “My uncle said, ‘Why don’t you look in South Africa’, because one of my cousins was there. So I did, and I found DSSA, and I went there for a year and a half.”

Her time at Design School Southern Africa was cut a little short, however, as Mina realised she wanted to learn more than what they were teaching. She headed back to Ghana, returning to intern with Kofi Ansah, while sending out applications to various design schools around the world. After a long search for a school with good programme that she could afford, Mina found herself heading to London, where she completed her degree.

As she talks about her time in Johannesburg, and later London, I can’t help but wonder if coming from Ghana made a difference to her experience abroad, or if it gave her a different perspective on fashion to that of her fellow students.

It helped me lookdeeper than what was on the surfaceand what was trendy.

“Coming from Ghana, you know what’s trendy, you know what’s fashionable, because you have access to DSTV, you have access to the internet, to magazines and stuff like that.” She pauses thoughtfully for a moment before continuing: “I would say that there just wasn’t really a sense of individual style, sometimes, in Ghana – everyone seemed to hop on the trends, and that’s how it was. So moving to SA wasn’t that much of a culture shock, but when it came to fashion I noticed it was a lot more expressive. People could just relax and be themselves, and dress how they feel. But in Ghana you can’t look like that – you look messy, or you look too different, you know?”

So while Mina was perfectly comfortable with her knowledge of fashion and trends, she found her

time beyond Ghana’s borders (both in South Africa, and London) broadened her insights into fashion and personal expression. “It helped me grow as a designer, especially when it comes to inspiration. It helped me look deeper than what was on the surface and what was trendy.”

This left me wondering, if Ghana was so trend-driven, how did Mina find a balance between her individual expression and the local trends once she returned home?

“What I had to understand when I got back,” she explains, “was that Ghanaian women seemed to be a lot more exposed and open-minded when it came to trends than when I had left. When I was leaving, it was just African print dresses and stuff that was trendy, I suppose because they hadn’t really

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seen anybody do anything else. So I had to take a risk, but not put anything too crazy out there, because maybe we hadn’t quite got there yet. But if you do something different that people haven’t seen before, that still identifies with what they are used to, I think that’s how you strike a balance.”

Defining African design as more than just African print is something that Mina feels quite strongly about. “I feel like there are so many other textiles, so many other aesthetics that can inspire you, that you can tap into within Africa itself. Right now, what’s trending outside is African print, but trends are just fads, they come and they go. It’s really up to us to keep injecting different aesthetics, and different textiles.”

International trends and expectations aside, designing for Africa is quite a different experience, according to Mina. “Africa is just so much more vibrant!” she says earnestly. “Ready-to-wear is sort of the norm overseas. People go into a Zara, go into an H&M, get what they need and go out. But in Africa, at least in Western Africa, when you try and stock ready-to-wear, you can’t have 50 of the same dress hanging up – it will not move. Everybody needs to feel like they are special; they don’t like having the same things as other people.”

Trends are just fads,they come and they go.It’s really up to usto keep injectingdifferent aesthetics.

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This can be a problem when it comes to sourcing fabrics and embellishments, as Ghana tends to have very few suppliers with enough stock. “My biggest fear is everyone having the same fabric as I have in my collection. For about two collections we actually made our own fabric, so it hasn’t been that much of a struggle sourcing for that, but for made-to-measure it generally is.”

People would have trouble sourcing anything like Mina Evan’s most recent runway collection, off the shelf, with its three-dimensional, multi-coloured butterfly cut-outs. True to her belief in creating something new that still identifies with tradition, Mina put a modern twist on a local Ghanaian print by using it to create the butterflies. What started out as a somewhat-tacky, gold-overlaid African print, became a visually stunning and luxurious embellishment on a collection that that is completely unique.

It’s this, I think, that holds the secret to Mina Evan’s success – the ability to embrace African heritage without becoming stifled by stereotypes. Rather, she uses the vibrant culture and tradition of our continent to forge a new definition of modern, African design.