The BoFG: Meet Chloe

Chloe Assam is an Accra-based designer, community organizer & founder of Bold_Underlined. Reflecting on fast fashion’s impact, Chloe says, “Fast Fashion has taken the essence of fashion itself...It affects how we make money, it affects our creativity because you want to be intentional so you are investing in certain things that could raise the quality of the products that you create but because you are competing with fast fashion you are forced to water down your collection." We want to underscore the fact that the secondhand clothing trade functions as fast fashion. We often hear proponents of secondhand exports argue that sending clothing from the global N to the global S stops brands like H&M from entering countries like Ghana. The opposite is true. The oversupply of cheap secondhand clothing erodes indigenous sustainability logic, causes designers like Chloe to water down their ideas & teaches citizens to view clothing as disposable, thus paving the way for foreign fast fashion brands to be in demand. Chloe organizes IG Live conversations via The Board of Fashion Ghana & she recently hosted a webinar that convened experts across the West Africa region with the purpose of building a stronger, interconnected fashion ecosystem. One of the topics discussed was the need for financial transparency and pay-scale guidelines. As Chloe mentions in her interview, she wants creatives to be compensated with money, not “exposure.” At Chloe’s suggestion we want to acknowledge that sh