Creative Credits
Creative direction/Costume design: @xawaashking
Photography: @mekbib_tadesse
Model: @hamek_hon
Makeup: @tsion.haileselassie
New Flower
New Flower, interrogates the complex and often intricate process of sartorial adornment in the African continent. The series focuses on the Horn of Africa region, using fabrics, jewelry, and ritualistic devices combined with a futuristic flair. In a world where sentiments like “less is more” are highly pervasive, the series seeks to highlight how in the global south, namely the African continent the converse holds true. How “more is more” is an accurate descriptor of how life is lived here. Mekbib and Gouled’s project seeks to highlight that. It seeks to show what it means to embrace your uniqueness, and be free from society’s limiting beauty ideals. The series also acts as a portal through which audiences are transported to the past, by paying homage to the vintage images of Ethiopian women in the nineties elegantly clad in their traditional wear posing in golden fields of Adey Abeba (yellow flowers) around the Ethiopian New Year.
Richly textured fabrics, and ornate jewelry, feature heavily in the images, to cement the idea that in East Africa fashion is both an elaborate, and artistic affair. Gouled worked with native, and vibrant materials, adding unique textures to the looks he created. Mekbib who has been a champion of the diverse beauty of blackness captured intimate shots that juxtapose shadow & light. Shot and staged in a field of Adey Abeba in Addis Ababa the location of the shoot is as important as the images themselves. The physical space allows us to grapple with the beauty of impermanence, and plays with the notion of temporality especially in relation to how fleeting the cycle of the Adey Abeba is. Looking out across the sloping hills, sight lines deceive and lend a perspectival intimacy that toys with a sense of distance and time. Allowing the images to take on a rather otherworldly, and whimsical quality.
