The BOFG: Meet Laetitia

Working under the label name Maison Midekor, Midekor Deladem Laetitia, is an Accra-based designer. We met Laetitia at the Revival Earth event a year ago when she helped me (Liz) up-cycle a jacket that I LOVE. We’ve since learned a lot from Laetitia’s perspective on secondhand & her passion for environmental justice. Laetitia has also worked with Collina Strada to up-cycle single use t-shirts into a runway look and she is a finalist in the Debonaire Afrik x Accra Mall Future Fashion Fund. Laetitia says that when it comes to sustainability, “for once, the West needs to accept that Africa has something they don’t have.” Couldn’t agree more! Fast fashion takes up a lot of space. In landfills. In our closets. On our Instagram feeds. On sales racks. Etc. As an organization we typically talk about how the fast fashion business model takes up space in the form of literal tons of secondhand clothing waste clogging Accra’s gutters, covering Accra’s seafloor, burning in open dumpsites and overwhelming Accra’s landfills. Fast fashion clearly occupies more than its fair share of the material world. Fast fashion also takes up far too much psychological and spiritual space! While the coronavirus pandemic has been devastating on many levels, this time has also called the pace of fashion into question. Whether production + consumption have actually slowed down or not, it feels like some of the tension caused by the fast fashion treadmill has been released. There’s less pressure to “keep