Frederica Brooksworth’s foray into fashion education on the continent

My mom can sew very well, so she used to make my clothes, growing up. She actually still has her Toyota sewing machine, which is older than me,” says Frederica Brooksworth as we start our interview.

Toyota? Sewing machines? “Yes! A lot of people don’t know this, but they didn’t start off making cars.” She’s right. Toyota, the automaker, is an offshoot of a business started by Sakichi Toyoda making automated looms for the textile business. His son Kiichiro would later pivot to automobile manufacturing, creating what would become the Toyota Motor Corporation. It’s an interesting fact to learn from the self-proclaimed fashion “edu-preneur”, whose journey into, and career in, fashion is just as fascinating.

Brooksworth, born to Ghanaian immigrant parents and raised in London, is the founder of the Council for International African Fashion Education (CIAFE). The non-profit organisation is committed to advancing the development and innovation of fashion education and research on the continent and in the diaspora. Its activities include closing the skills gap by offering free short courses, and it is in a partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing to spotlight research by African and diasporic writers in order to stimulate scholarly activity. This is a pivotal step in the pursuit of one of its goals — helping to decolonialise fashion education.

While many still think of a job in fashion as becoming a designer or working in retail, Brooksworth’s journey stands out because of her determination to build a career that addresses the need for empowerment in a sector that has, for a long time, ignored and overlooked the continent and diaspora. The likes of okayafrica.com have listed her as among a “new wave of professionals shaping fashion’s future in Africa”, but this wasn’t something Brooksworth set out to do.

“I thought I would become a hairstylist,” she says. “For starters, I really don’t like sewing. It’s weird that my mommy used to make my clothes, but she did teach me how to do hair, so throughout secondary school I used to do people’s hair.” It’s not that she wasn’t interested in fashion. She took textiles as a subject at school, but hairdressing was far more interesting to a 12-year-old making £30 a week having turned part of her room in her parents’ home into a salon. She would go on to study hairdressing after graduating from high school, but this was when her latent interest in fashion took hold.

“I know this sounds clichéd, but I was reading magazines. I was loving the aspect of it that was about reading rather than [thinking], ‘Oh, my gosh, this person is great, I want to be like them.’ I was curious about how they put these magazines together.” It was around this time that Brooksworth had a talk with a family friend who was studying fashion marketing and promotion. “When she told me more about it, it was like, ‘Okay, so you’re learning how to take pictures, how to write and promote stuff?’”

The young Brooksworth had not heard of anything of the sort before. She was intrigued. As for most people, fashion to her meant designing and making clothes. With this new information in hand, she thought it might be a good idea to leave hairstyling behind and pursue a career in fashion — one that was not about making clothes but more about “putting things together”, as she puts it. Soon, a BTech in fashion promotion and marketing followed at what was then the Greenwich Community College (now London South East Colleges). An internship as an assistant at a fashion magazine cemented her interest before she eventually enrolled at the London College of Fashion (LCF).

“LCF was an incredible experience,” she says. “What was so pivotal about it is that my course leader was a Black Zambian man.” It’s because of this that Brooksworth came to realise the importance of representation in education — something that would inform her founding of CIAFE. At LCF she became involved with a department called “Widening Participation”. “They were focused on getting students whose parents hadn’t gone to university and giving them an opportunity to actually have a fair chance at getting admission.” It was an important task for someone who had been the first in her family to get a higher education. “It just opened my eyes to the importance of education, and how people’s lives can be changed through having the right support. Having those amazing experiences early on is what led me to want to pursue a career in fashion education,” she adds.

This desire to contribute through fashion education led Brooksworth back to Ghana. She took a break from her duties lecturing at LCF and other institutions such as the Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design to learn about fashion education systems on the continent. Thus began the work to build CIAFE, which now has an office in Accra in addition to its headquarters in London. One major outcome of all of this passion and experience is the two-volume Fashion Marketing in Emerging Economies (Palgrave Macmillan) due out later this month, edited by Brooksworth alongside Emmanuel Mogaji and Genevieve Bosah (lecturers at the universities of Greenwich and Hertfordshire, respectively).

Her work at CIAFE focuses on education, training, and curriculum development, and these books are an important extension of that, covering a wide range of emerging markets and promoting their recognition as key growth markets for the global fashion industry.