Amanda Winnie Kabuiku launched Naïfs in 2020 with a provocation: what would a luxury fashion magazine look like if it stopped centering European aesthetics and started treating the cultures it had historically labeled "naïf" — folk, primitive, other — as the sophisticated traditions they actually are? The answer runs to 330 bilingual pages per issue, printed on premium matte stock, with production values that rival any glossy on the Condé Nast rack.
The name itself is an act of reclamation. In art history, "naïf" was the term applied to non-European, non-academically trained work — a polite way of saying untutored, unsophisticated, lesser. Kabuiku and her team flip this entirely, wearing the label as a badge of pride and filling each issue with the creative directors, designers, musicians, and cultural figures who have disrupted the industry by their very presence. Sophie Fontanel, Hugues Lawson-Body, and a rotating cast of photographers and stylists from across Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora populate its pages.
Naïfs is distributed through specialist bookshops in France, the UK, and the Netherlands, and can be found at places like Cahier Central and Casa Magazines in New York. The magazine has stated its ambition to expand into Lagos, Dakar, Marrakech, Johannesburg, and Kinshasa — building a distribution network that mirrors the global scope of its editorial vision.
In a media landscape saturated with diversity pledges and inclusion hashtags, Naïfs does something more radical: it simply builds the magazine it wants to see, with the production quality that says this is not a niche concern but the main event.
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