When fashion designer Bobby Kolade returned to Kampala from Berlin in 2018, he came with an ambitious vision: to help revive Uganda’s once-thriving cotton and textile industry.
The plan seemed straightforward. After years spent building a career in Europe’s fashion capitals, including working with luxury houses such as Balenciaga and establishing his own label in Berlin, Kolade hoped to create a fashion brand rooted in Ugandan cotton, local manufacturing and industrial regeneration.
What he discovered instead was an industry that had largely disappeared.
Uganda’s textile sector, once among East Africa’s most significant industrial employers, had deteriorated dramatically following decades of political instability, economic restructuring and the overwhelming influx of imported second-hand clothing. Factories had closed, production infrastructure had vanished and the manufacturing ecosystem needed to support a large-scale cotton-based fashion business no longer existed. Cotton output, which had been central to Uganda’s economy in the early 1970s, had fallen sharply over subsequent decades, leaving little industrial capacity behind.
For many designers, the collapse of the very system they hoped to build upon might have marked the end of the dream. For Kolade, it became the beginning of an entirely different project.
His response was BUZIGAHILL, the Kampala-based fashion label named after the leafy neighbourhood where he settled after returning home. Rather than waiting for an industrial revival, Kolade decided to work with the material Uganda already had in abundance: second-hand clothing.
The result was Return to Sender, an ongoing project that has become one of the most provocative interventions in contemporary sustainable fashion.
At the centre of the initiative is Kampala’s sprawling Owino Market, one of East Africa’s largest second-hand clothing markets. Every day, enormous bales of discarded garments from Europe, North America and Asia arrive in markets such as Owino, feeding a second-hand economy that now accounts for the majority of clothing purchases in Uganda. Industry observers estimate that imported used garments represent roughly 80 percent of clothing purchases in the country.
For Kolade, these garments are not merely clothing; they are evidence of a deeply unequal global fashion system.
Inside BUZIGAHILL’s Kampala studio, garments sourced from Owino are washed, deconstructed, cut apart and painstakingly reconstructed into entirely new pieces. Men’s suits become contemporary tailoring, sportswear is transformed into patchwork ensembles and discarded textiles are given new identities through skilled craftsmanship and design intervention. Each item is unique, shaped by whatever emerges from the second-hand bales purchased at market.
The most radical aspect of the project lies not in the redesign itself, but in where the finished garments are sold.
Rather than targeting local consumers, BUZIGAHILL exports these upcycled pieces back to countries in the Global North, including the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Canada and South Korea, effectively returning the West’s discarded clothing to its place of origin. Every piece carries documentation identifying where the original garments came from, transforming each item into both a fashion object and a political statement.
In doing so, Return to Sender reverses one of fashion’s most entrenched trade routes.
For decades, millions of tonnes of unwanted clothing from wealthier nations have flowed into countries across Africa, often undermining domestic textile industries while simultaneously generating vast quantities of waste. Critics argue that the trade has turned many African countries into de facto disposal sites for overproduction generated elsewhere. Kolade’s project seeks to expose these dynamics while demonstrating alternative possibilities for circular production.
But BUZIGAHILL is not simply a critique.
It is also an experiment in industrial rebuilding.
Kolade has repeatedly described the brand as part of a longer-term ambition to restore Uganda’s manufacturing capacity through decentralised production, artisanal collaboration and specialised workshops spread across the country. The project has already worked with local makers, craftspeople, second-hand traders and initiatives such as the Milaya Project in the Bidi Bidi refugee settlement, broadening its social and economic impact beyond fashion alone.
In recent years, BUZIGAHILL has gained increasing international visibility, presenting collections during Berlin Fashion Week and attracting attention from global fashion publications, sustainability advocates and cultural institutions. The label’s work has become emblematic of a new generation of African designers who are redefining sustainability on their own terms rather than adopting models developed elsewhere.
For Kolade, the future of fashion cannot be separated from questions of history, trade and justice.
Through Return to Sender, he is not merely redesigning old clothes. He is forcing the fashion industry to confront uncomfortable questions about consumption, waste and responsibility, while imagining what a genuinely circular fashion economy might look like when viewed from Kampala rather than London, Paris or New York.
In an era defined by overproduction and excess, BUZIGAHILL offers a simple but powerful proposition: perhaps the future of fashion begins by sending things back.
