The Front Row Podcast

The Front Row Podcast is where the people who make African fashion actually happen sit down and talk, at length, without a runway or a press release in the room. Every episode is a single long conversation — no roundtable, no rotating panel — built around one designer, editor or executive who has spent years shaping how the continent's fashion industry looks, sells and travels. The tone is unhurried: we're less interested in a soundbite than in how someone actually built what they built, the decisions that didn't work, and the ones that did.

Recent episodes have sat down with names most listeners will recognize and a few they should. In one of our most-shared conversations this year, Lagos-based designer Ngozi Achebe-Bello, founder of the label Aso Rock, walked us through the eighteen months it took to move her atelier from made-to-order pieces to a wholesale line carried in three countries — including the supplier relationship that nearly ended the label before it began. Other guests have included buying directors, magazine editors and the founders building the backend of the industry: logistics, financing, retail.

New episodes land every other Thursday, and the archive now runs deep enough that first-time listeners often start with whichever name they recognize and end up staying for the ones they don't. If you want to understand how African fashion actually works — not the version on the runway, but the version in the ledgers and the fitting rooms — this is the place to start.