When SZA stepped out in Adinkra symbols in a recent look, the moment landed harder than a styling choice usually does.
For Ghanaians, those symbols are not decoration. They are language. Each one carries a proverb, a value, a way of moving through the world, passed down by the Akan and Gyaman peoples long before anyone thought to call it fashion. To see them on a global stage, worn by an artist with that kind of reach, is to watch generations of inherited meaning meet the present in real time.
The Moment
Those symbols are not decoration. They are language.
This is what happens when heritage shows up where the whole world is looking. It is powerful. And when it is done with intention, when it opens a door to a deeper conversation rather than closing one, it is more powerful still.
The language of Adinkra
Adinkra symbols have their roots among the Akan of Ghana, and the name is often linked to the idea of saying farewell. The cloth was traditionally worn at funerals and important ceremonies. In towns such as Ntonso, in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, the symbols are still hand-stamped onto cloth using carved calabash stamps and a deep black dye made from tree bark, a practice passed from one generation of makers to the next.
There are hundreds of Adinkra symbols, each with its own meaning. A few of the best known:
Sankofa
Return and get it: learn from the past
Gye Nyame
Except for God: the supremacy of God
Dwennimmen
Ram’s horns: humility and strength
Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu
Joined crocodiles: unity in diversity
Nkyinkyim
The zigzag: adaptability and initiative
To wear Adinkra is to wear a sentence, a belief, a piece of philosophy. That is why seeing it on a global stage matters, and why it deserves to be understood as well as admired.
A symbol that moves with you
The thread between culture, sustainability and what we choose to wear is not new. It is the thinking that built No Single Use Fashion, the campaign founded by BLACK PEARL CEO Samata Pattinson, from its very first day.
The Oscars
Pattinson, a British-born Ghanaian, carried that thinking onto the Oscars red carpet. Her gown held a beaded Sankofa symbol at its centre.
The piece was designed in collaboration with a Nigerian designer at the helm: two women, two heritages, one continent’s memory worn out loud.
Sankofa · Adinkra symbol · “return and get it”
Drawn from the Akan proverb Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi: it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.
Look back in order to move forward.
That is the point of Sankofa. It is not nostalgia. It is continuity. The past is not behind us; it moves with us, stitched into everything made next. Sankofa asks that we retrieve what matters and carry it forward, deliberately.
“The past is not behind us. It moves with us.”
The cost of forgetting
The wider culture is living through the opposite of Sankofa. It is living through a culture built to forget.
The global fashion industry produces more than 100 billion garments a year. Much of that is fast fashion, engineered for speed, low cost and relentless trend turnover, and it has trained us to treat clothing as disposable.
Behind the sparkle sits a hidden cost, paid by people and by the planet. Textile dyeing and finishing are linked to roughly a fifth of industrial water pollution. According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the equivalent of a rubbish truck of clothing is landfilled or burned every second. And the workers who make these clothes too often face low pay and unsafe conditions to meet a demand that never slows.
Why Live Music
Live music is where the culture of forgetting shows most plainly. Every year, an estimated 7.5 million festival outfits are worn once and thrown away, most of them synthetic, most of them bound for landfill, shedding microplastics long after the music stops.
But live music is also where culture is made. Festivals and concerts bring millions of people together around the artists they love, and what those artists wear, say and stand for travels far beyond the stage. That makes live music one of the most powerful places to change how we think about what we wear.
Why artists matter
This is where artists come in, and why a moment like SZA’s matters beyond the image.
Conviction Made Visible
In SZA’s case, the Adinkra look is of a piece with a deeper, long-standing commitment. Her advocacy centres on climate justice and the fight against environmental racism: the unequal burden of pollution, and the unequal access to resources like tree cover, in Black, Indigenous and communities of colour.
When an artist with that record wears heritage with intention, the gesture carries weight. Fans don’t just see a look. They see values, and they’re invited to share them.
Heritage worn with intention is conviction made visible.
Connection, Not Consumption
No Single Use Fashion
Live music has the power to spark a cultural shift. No Single Use Fashion invites fans and artists alike to pledge a different relationship with what they wear, and to turn fashion and music into a force for connection, not consumption.
No Single Use Fashion
None of this is new. The cultures NSUF draws from understood something the industry has unlearned: that what we wear can be cared for, mended and carried forward.
GHANA
Cloth is inherited and remade, carrying family and memory from one generation to the next.
JAPAN
Kintsugi repairs broken ceramics with gold, and sashiko reinforces worn fabric with visible, decorative stitching. Damage is never hidden; it is honoured.
INDIA
A spirit of jugaad, ingenious improvisation, runs deep, and kantha quilts are made from layers of worn saris, stitched together into something new.
INDIGENOUS NATIONS
Across many nations, damaged ceremonial garments are restored by community knowledge-keepers, keeping living history intact.
Sankofa · Return, Retrieve, Move Forward
Hold On to What Matters
When heritage walks the red carpet with intention, it does more than look beautiful. It reminds a watching world that the most radical thing anyone can do is hold on to what matters and carry it forward.
Sankofa. Return, retrieve, and move forward. That is the work, and it is an invitation to build it together.
