Ajepomaa Gallery — AHABAN

The cloth starts as mill offcuts. AHABAN, named for the Akan word for leaf and built around what is left of Ghana's forests and waterways, is cut from handwoven Aso Oke and Fugu alongside cotton batik made from deadstock sourced out of GTP's mills, which puts the collection's material story in a warehouse most designers write off. The convention in luxury is to treat deadstock as a limitation and say so in the press release. Ajepomaa Mensah treats it as the good cloth and spends the hours on construction instead: knife, box, bias and sunburst pleats, origami folds worked into a batik that was never engineered to hold a shape. She has run the house out of Accra since February 2010 and sells it from 53 Adjiringano Road, from ₵1,288 for the Kenya top to ₵3,888 for the Halima dress, shipping free inside Ghana. Sixteen years in one city, no runway theatrics, and a rail of finished garments you can buy this afternoon.