Mahlet Afework has spent more than the last decade building one of Ethiopia’s most sustainable fashion labels: Mafi Mafi. The award-winning brand has been celebrated for its striking designs, seamlessly blending Ethiopian heritage with ready-to-wear fashion that has been showcased on catwalks from Lagos to London.
Now, the visionary behind the label is channeling her experience into establishing one of the country’s leading fashion schools. Driven by the challenges she encountered while building her label and the difficulty of finding skilled local talent, Afework is launching the Mafi Fashion Academy and Lab (MFAL) — a groundbreaking institution designed to bridge the gap in quality fashion education in Ethiopia and Africa.
“I always wanted to open a fashion academy focused on quality education, but it was originally a dream for the distant future,” she tells OkayAfrica. “However, as Mafi Mafi began to grow, both locally and internationally, the demand for skilled talent surged. It became very difficult to find the right talent in the market, which made it clear that the time to act was now.”
Fashion is actually Afework’s second career, having found fame as a rapper at the age of 16. But even then, fashion was at the forefront as she had to make her own clothes to create the aesthetic for her photoshoots and videos. “While doing that, I also designed and made fashion pieces at home. It didn’t take long for me to realize I wanted to focus on fashion,” she says. She explains that she taught herself to sew by using Google. When she could, she also tried to take technical classes locally, while also searching for scholarships to attend fashion schools in Europe and North America.
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