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The MÄFO Movement :One Dress.5,000Women. Infinite Stories.
Award-winning Cameroonian designer and KiBONEN founder Kibonen Nfi is taking her growing MÄFO Dress Movement to an increasingly global audience, bringing women across fashion, business and culture together around African heritage, sisterhood and the power of indigenous African textiles.
For its latest chapter during New York Fashion Week, Nfi enlisted Claire Sulmers, founder and CEO of Fashion Bomb Daily, to host the MÄFO Dress Brunch in New York - bringing together 100 women wearing the culturally significant MÄFO dress, each styled to reflect the individuality of the woman wearing it.
The partnership for the event feels particularly fitting. Sulmers has built a career amplifying Black fashion and its creatives, while Nfi's work centres Cameroonian design, cultural heritage and the economic value of African creativity.
But MÄFO itself is Nfi's vision.
What began with just seven women has evolved into a growing movement with an ambitious goal: bringing 5,000 women together in the MÄFO Dress.
MÄFO translates to “Queen Mother” in the Bamileke culture of Cameroon - a title associated with dignity, wisdom, influence and service. Inspired by traditional Nduop textiles, the dress translates that cultural heritage into a contemporary knit silhouette.
And perhaps that distinction makes the sisterhood story even more interesting: this isn't two women creating a fashion collection together. It is one woman building a culturally rooted movement and another influential woman using her platform to help carry that story into a bigger room.
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