PRESS CONFERENCE

PRESS CONFERENCE UNGERMAN – UNDEUTSCH Five Years After Black Lives Matter: What Has Truly Changed? Tap in to hear voices that are not waiting for a seat at the table - We are building new rooms, new runways, new businesses, new realities. It’s about ownership! Five years after the global uprising under the banner of Black Lives Matter and in the heart of the UN Decade for People of African Descent, we pause to ask the urgent, uncomfortable, necessary question What has truly changed? In this episode, recorded live during Fashion Africa Now’s third press conference, leading women of African descent from the creative industries and visionary business consultants — including Beatrace Oola, Kemi Fatoba, Meriem Lebdiri, Boitumelo Pooe, and Jacqueline Shaw — come together to reflect, reckon, and reimagine. The conversation is moderated by Prof. Marcellous Jones, with powerful written statements contributed by Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka and Isi Ahmed. We explore the deep fault lines that still define the German fashion scene: ✔️ Selective visibility. ✔️ Token & Colorism inclusion. ✔️ Structural exclusion masked as progress. Author Fatima El-Tayeb’s term UNGERMAN serves as a framework to unpack how racialized communities – especially Black people, Muslims, and Roma – continue to be treated as permanently foreign, while whiteness remains the silent standard of national identity. 🎧 Together, we ask: Who gets to define African fashion? Who profits from it – and who is systematically left out? How can solidarity-based economies disrupt extractive systems? What would real, structural investment in Black creatives in Germany look like? We don't need more symbolic gestures. It is time for redistribution, recognition, and radical imagination because fashion is more than fabric. It is memory. It is resistance. It encompasses the past, present, and future. Support the show