Upcycling On The Fly

Kenyan fashion entrepreneur Ruth Abade uses upcycled materials to create vibrant clothes and accessories with sustainability sewn into them

- Alastair Hagger

It was something I’ve never seen. I was like, ‘maybe this is what they mean by the end of the world?’ The sky looked orange. And then it just went really, really dark.”

In June, the New York skies were flooded with apocalyptic color, as Canadian wildfires moved south and the smoke transformed the global center of fashion into a burned sienna hellscape. Kenyan fashion entrepreneur Ruth Abade is in the city for trade shows, describing by video call this ominous reminder of the consequences of unfettered consumption: the world’s most charismatic metropolis reduced in minutes to incandescent shadows.

She is the owner of Blackfly Designs, an apparel, jewelry and textile company with practical sustainability embedded in its seams.

Abade and her dozen-strong team, based in Kibera’s Toi Market in Nairobi, use upcycled materials to create one-of-a-kind clothes and accessories buzzing with quirky innovation.

Blackfly’s bomber jackets pop with the vibrancy of re-purposed Indian saris; its shoulder bags are clever, jazzy patchworks of African fabric off-cuts, finished with expertly curated scraps of leather and salvaged metal fittings. The jewelry pieces are geometric alignments of the rough and the smooth, metallic juxtapositions of the polished and the well-traveled.

An industrial designer by training, Abade spent a year in Florence learning leather bag design before her skills coalesced into a business in 2012.

“I decided that if you’re a designer, you shouldn’t have to partition - you should be able to produce anything, in any field," she says.