Uganda-Italia-Sahel: Stella Jean’s Spring 2027 collection named its territories upfront. Skipping the Milan Fashion Week calendar, Jean’s clothes sold over the summer while she was in Kampala. There, the women of Meeting Point International, founded by Ugandan nurse Rose Busingye to support women living with HIV, have spent around 15 years rolling discarded paper into beads for bracelets and necklaces whose proceeds helped fund a local school. When Jean suggested turning the same technique into clothing, they laughed. The first experiment became a skirt: colored paper beads coated in natural latex, threaded onto elastic nylon, and knotted one by one. “I know it sounds absurd, but it’s incredibly wearable. It’s elastic, resistant, and there is no fabric or metal hardware involved,” Jean said.
The collaboration developed through the FAO Mountain Partnership’s Fashion for Fragile Ecosystems program, but Jean is especially interested in what happens once she leaves. “The aim isn’t to make them dependent on me,” she said. “Whatever we create has to be something they can continue producing without my assistance, in complete autonomy.” That requirement dictated the construction: no zippers, complicated patterns, machinery, or processes dependent on electricity. The technique appears as a pencil skirt under an oversized white shirt, a tank dress dissolving into floor-length fringe, and an open-fringed skirt worn with a cropped polo. Even repair had to be reconsidered: “We basically invented customer service for paper clothes,” said Jean.
Uganda also contributed rigid handwoven straw containers from the Bwindi area, adapted into waist bags with Italian leather fastenings. Elsewhere, Jean returned to Mali’s Bogolan, dyed with fermented mud, and Bundu Bundu, assembled from narrow handwoven strips. Oversized earrings were cut from discarded oil drums in Haiti’s fer découpé tradition. “You don’t get that slightly pitying impression recycled things can sometimes give,” Jean added. Impressively, all these geographies remained legible, rather than melting into one decorative language.
Jean’s counterweight, as ever, came from Italy: men’s striped shirting, white cotton drawn-work embroidery recalling family trousseaux, and rigid bustiers painted and embroidered in Umbria. “Without a strong and recognizable counterpoint, it becomes costume on one side or the other,” said Jean. A T-shirt reading Sei libera, sii grande, borrowed from Palazzo Madama’s Maccari Hall, added another layer. “It’s almost as if someone says: I freed you, now it’s your responsibility to become great,” she explained. “As Italians, we always carry that weight. We have a real performance anxiety when it comes to fashion.” That exchange between freedom and responsibility also defines the work in Kampala: Jean develops the idea, then gives it back. “Co-creation has to evolve beyond that useless, paternalistic way of helping,” she said. “They already do this to live. If we meet each other halfway, then we can create something together.”
