Tommy Tse

Project Description Sensing Authenticity: The Life of Fashion in Kenya It is just after dawn at Gikomba Market in Nairobi. The city is still half-asleep, but the day is already in full motion. Shoes spill out of opened mitumba bales onto muddy ground as brokers dash through narrow alleys, balancing sneakers on their shoulders, shouting prices, negotiating while moving. More than 360,000 pairs of second-hand shoes arrive here every day from Europe, the United States, and increasingly China. At first, the market appears overwhelming. Then its rhythms begin to reveal themselves: a machine for turning circulation into value. These photographs follow traders, brokers, cleaners, and resellers through one of Africa’s largest second-hand fashion markets, where authenticity is tested, handled, and narrated. Eyes scan stitching and soles at a glance; hands squeeze, bend, sniff, and weigh shoes within seconds. Nearby, teenage cleaners squat on the street, speed-washing dozens of pairs in grey foam that runs like a river through the alleys. “I can smell if a shoe is from China or the UK,” one Kenyan retailer tells us, describing how chemical residues become clues about circulation histories and expected durability. At Gikomba, fashion value flickers into being through touch, smell, movement, timing, negotiation, and bodies trained to recognise what can still hold together, circulate, and become “authentic” for its second life. Text by Tommy Tse. Photography by Paul Cox. - - - Acknowledgement: This study was funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant 2021 Research and Innovation Programme, under the project ‘China Fashion Power: Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains’ (Grant agreement No. 101044619). Bio Tommy Tse is Associate Professor of Media Studies at The University of Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He specialises in Asia’s media and cultural industries, consumer culture, creative labour, digital culture, and fashion. He is a Principal Editor of International Journal of Fashion Studies and serves the Editorial Board of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture. For details, see: www.tommyhltse.com