There is a nice symmetry to Mzukisi Mbane’s year. In June, the founder and creative director of Imprint South Africa was in Paris accepting the Best Fashion Designer 2026 title through Africa Fashion Up. A few weeks later, he was back on the continent, first in Eswatini and then Nairobi, revisiting more than a decade of the prints that helped get him there.
For a designer whose work has always been interested in African identity, memory and belonging, the trajectory feels significant. Imprint’s growing international profile has not prompted Mbane to look away from the continent. Instead, 2026 has seen the two parts of the brand’s identity, its global ambitions and its distinctly African point of view, increasingly overlap.
“I have come to understand that leaving a mark isn’t only about being seen,” says Mbane. “It is about leaving evidence that we were here, that our stories mattered and that African fashion belongs wherever the global fashion conversation is happening.”
Founded more than a decade ago, Imprint describes itself as an Afro-Futuristic, Pan-African fashion house. Bold colour and print are its most immediately recognisable signatures, but Mbane has long used them to explore something more substantial, drawing on histories, people and cultures from across the continent.
That approach received a significant international nod during Paris Fashion Week in June, when Mbane presented as part of Africa Fashion Up and was named Best Fashion Designer 2026. The Balenciaga-endorsed prize also brings mentorship with the French fashion house, further study at Istituto Marangoni Paris and business-development exposure through HEC Paris.
“Paris was an extraordinary affirmation of that journey,” Mbane says. But rather than allowing the recognition to pull his attention exclusively towards Europe, what followed was equally important to him. “Being able to move from Paris back onto the African continent, to Eswatini and then Nairobi, feels equally important to me.”
In Eswatini, Imprint appeared as a headline fashion designer at the Standard Bank Luju Food & Lifestyle Festival. Then, in August, the house travelled to Kenya for Noir Kenya Fashion Week.
It was in Nairobi that Mbane took stock of where Imprint has been.
Rather than designing an entirely new print story for the occasion, he went digging through the house’s own visual history. The resulting 23-look collection revisited motifs, colours and signatures from different periods of Imprint’s decade-long practice, reworking them alongside one another.
In that context, print becomes more than the quickest way to recognise an Imprint garment. It functions almost as a record of the label itself. Patterns that once belonged to individual collections return years later in a different context, revealing what has changed and what Mbane has chosen to carry forward.
It is an interesting proposition at a time when fashion is forever searching for the next thing. Imprint’s Nairobi collection instead asks what can be found by looking back at your own work.
The trip also produced a fashion editorial photographed in Kenya by Rogers Ouma with creative direction and styling by Mbane. Rather than simply photographing a South African collection in another country, the images bring Imprint’s aesthetic into conversation with Kenyan creative talent.
That exchange feels particularly relevant to the way Mbane thinks about Imprint. While the label has appeared on platforms from New York and Milan to Lagos, Dakar, Shanghai and Paris, its ambitions have never depended on becoming less recognisably African.
“I want Imprint to grow internationally without ever having to dilute where it comes from,” Mbane says. “Our African identity is not the limitation to our global ambition; it is the reason for it.”
It’s a useful distinction. African designers achieving international recognition are still too often discussed through the language of having “arrived” once Paris, Milan, London or New York pays attention. Imprint’s recent run offers a slightly different narrative. Paris matters, certainly. But so do Eswatini and Nairobi.
For Mbane, the point appears to be less about choosing between an international fashion career and an African one than refusing the idea that the two are opposites. More than a decade after founding Imprint, “leaving a mark” has taken on a broader meaning: not simply being seen, but making sure the stories behind the clothes travel with them.
Wanted
