Tokyo Africa Collection
Tokyo Africa Collection is a fashion initiative featuring fusion of Tokyo culture and African designs, established in 2016. It has been incorporated as Stagebank Inc. (formely Tokyo Africa Collection, Inc.), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Our vision is to connect Africa and Asia especially by promoting excellent brands and service from Africa in Japan via fashion show and related projects with sophisticated branding, casting, and contents to appeal target consumers. Especially, we have strength in marketing for Japanese and Asian young generation who are not interested in Africa. Tokyo Africa Collection has been offering African style of fashion in a way it attracts and fits to Japanese and Asian people. While featuring African fashion brands, it uses mostly Asian models unlike other African fashion movements in Europe and Asia.
Since 2016, we have had more than 2000 audience in our shows while collaborating with the other fashion shows and events which include Global Festa hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan in 2016, Ima no Africa hosted by African Diplomatic Corps, and Bon for Africa hosted by JICA in 2019. We have collaborated with Djiboutian designer EMEL for Ima no Africa and Bon for Africa and also collaborated with ZIN KATO, well known Japanese fashion brand, for Bon for Africa.
2019年9月1日にOur latest show, Tokyo Africa Collection 2019, was held in 1st September 2019, at Yurakucho Asahi Hall. Tickets were sold out and we had more than 600 audiences. It was certified as official TICAD 7 partner project by Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and endorsed by JICA, JETRO, AfDB, and many other African embassies in Japan. We assigned Sayaka Akimoto, former AKB48 member, as special show directors for Tokyo Africa Collection 2019.
We invited several Rwandan designers and models to showcase at Tokyo Africa Collection 2019. We also invited South Sudanese designer Winnie Godi and collaborated with Nigerian footwear brand KEEXS for the show. We also initiated “special show director project” in 2019 and we brought our first special show director Sayaka Akimoto to Rwanda to promote Rwandan fashion brands in Japan which attracted attention in Japan and Rwanda.
Besides the fashion show, Tokyo Africa Collection started to organize pop-up shop with cooperation of Marui Corporation, biggest department store in Japan. In 2020, we conducted pop-up shop also in Singapore at LUMINE Singapore from September to November and at Raffles Hotel Singapore in December, expanding its activity based to the other Asian countries.
Tokyo Africa Collection have been covered in various media including NHK (Japanese national broadcaster), the Japan Times, WWD, Asahi Shinbum, Mainichi Shimbun, an an, and other fashion and mass media.
