WUZZAWAZZEE is a clothing brand I founded in 2018, emerging from a lifelong practice of sewing and enthusiasm for textiles, and over a decade of sustained engagement with rural and regional cultures across Ethiopia.
The project took shape through many repeated visis into far-reaching rural cultures, original for musical purposedes, but it was where I discovered fabric operating not only as adornment, but as a form of social language—encoding identity, geography, ritual, status, and daily life. While my overall cultural study centered on music, it expanded naturally to language, and then textile traditions. I encountering the Amharic word WUZZAWAZZEE, meaning “swinging", and felt it an apt word to encompass the project’s continual movement—between cultures, disciplines, spaces, and between tradition and reinterpretation.Careful relationship-building, long-term observation, and a anthropological approach had me tracing the zigzagging stories through which textiles circulate, and along the way found ingenuity in the constraints that come with rural sewing techniques.
Each collection of garments begins with time spent in a specific rural locale, learning the knowledge systems embedded in the cloth and its construction. From there, I bring my background in self-taaught pattern-making, tailoring, and style into a dialogue with these materials and traditions. Each piece is hand-cut and hand-constructed, integrating Ethiopian fabrics and techniques with my own sense of design.The result: sturdy flattering garments that are marked with a distinct playfulness and vibrancy.
Rather than extraction, the work moves toward continuity and recontextualization—honoring the integrity of Ethiopian textile traditions while introducing them into new aesthetic and social frameworks. The silhouettes are intentionally classic and wearable, yet alive with the textures, rhythms, and color logics of their origins.
WUZZAWAZZEE is a practice of continuity and transformation—working across cultural forms without flattening them. Each piece carries a record of movement, exchange, and ongoing cultural dialogue.
