Wax the future

“From pattern to protest to Prêt-à-porter”

An international collaborative Fashion & Networkproject by Austin Nortey (Kumazi) Elia Rediger (Basel) & Collaborators.
Basel, Kumazi, Accra.

WAX THE FUTURE (2026/2027) examines the colonial tension between story and repetition.
While many African and Asian cultures transmit knowledge through storytelling, European modernity is built on repetition — on industrial reproduction, copying, and branding.

“Exploring veiling as an act of resistance and survival.”
Within the WAX COLLECTION, an eclectic fashion-driven project, we draw on the principles of wax and dyeing — processes of layering, masking, and revealing.
Through additive storytelling and diffuse thinking, we experiment with transparent film, tracing paper, and pigments to explore questions of visibility, opacity, and transformation.

How can design protect, expose, and reinvent collective identity?

WAX THE RICH is a collective textile statement —
a fabric that speaks, sweats, repeats, imitates, and ultimately rebels.
A project about patterns as instruments of power, about cultural appropriation, and about reclaiming aesthetic narratives through new generations of artists, designers, and performers.

Europe has learned to repeat stories.
Colonial textile history has been a history of copying:
from Swiss Glarus prints to Indonesian batik to the so-called African Wax Print.

WAX COLLECTION reverses this movement — presenting a prototype WAX FUTURE show in which textiles are not displayed, but liberated.

If patterns are stories — what happens when we print them again?

WAX COLLECTION is not a fashion project.
It is a performative reflection on ownership, beauty, and power.
An attempt to overwrite textile memory.
A catwalk of the future, stitched from the past.