Stella Jean Skips Milan Fashion Week for Spring 2027 Collection Rooted in Uganda, Mali, and Haiti

Key facts

• Stella Jean's Spring 2027 ready-to-wear collection is named Uganda-Italia-Sahel.
• Jean skipped the Milan Fashion Week calendar and sold the clothes over the summer while in Kampala.
• The collection was developed through the FAO Mountain Partnership's Fashion for Fragile Ecosystems program.
• Meeting Point International, founded by Ugandan nurse Rose Busingye to support women living with HIV, has spent around 15 years rolling discarded paper into beads for bracelets and necklaces whose proceeds helped fund a local school.
• The first paper-bead clothing experiment became a skirt made of colored paper beads coated in natural latex, threaded onto elastic nylon, and knotted one by one.
• The construction avoids zippers, complicated patterns, machinery, or processes dependent on electricity to allow autonomous production.
• Uganda contributed rigid handwoven straw containers from the Bwindi area, adapted into waist bags with Italian leather fastenings.
• Jean used Mali's Bogolan, dyed with fermented mud, and Bundu Bundu, assembled from narrow handwoven strips, plus oversized earrings cut from discarded oil drums in Haiti's fer découpé tradition.
• Italian elements included men's striped shirting, white cotton drawn-work embroidery recalling family trousseaux, and rigid bustiers painted and embroidered in Umbria.
• A T-shirt reading Sei libera, sii grande was borrowed from Palazzo Madama's Maccari Hall.