Flagship

Africa’s booming fashion industry

Africa’s fashion industry is booming, but needs more investment to meet its potential, UNESCO said. The industry is worth $15.5 billion, and could triple that over a decade if infrastructure improve, the UN cultural body argued in a report. The continent has a young population, and “Africans want to wear Africa,” the founder of Lagos Fashion Week told Africanews. “It’s really beautiful to see because it hasn’t always been like this.” Growth has been spurred by e-commerce — social media is key to new fashion brands in Nigeria, particularly — and by a new wave of young designers focused on “local fashion and heritage.” “Africa is really the next frontier” for the fashion industry, one designer said.

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Crisis point for Marvel

After a decade of dominance, the Marvel franchise is wobbling. Recent films have not had the box-office impact of prior works, and a pandemic-era decision to push vast amounts of content out via Disney+ led to a dilution of quality, Variety reported. Time pressures led to several works, including this year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, premiering with unfinished visual effects, while Jonathan Majors, who plays the character lined up to be the Avengers series’ next big antagonist, faces a domestic abuse trial. But despite “half-baked scripts” and overrun budgets — She-Hulk: Attorney at Law cost $25 million per 30-minute episode — Marvel hopes it can reinvigorate itself, starting with next year’s Deadpool 3.

Tour bus? No thanks, we’re walking

A British band went on tour around Wales on foot, walking 870 miles and performing almost 50 gigs in 60 days. Filkin’s Drift, a two-piece folk band, carried their instruments on their backs, and used “an elaborate system of carabiners” to strap their bags full of clothes and equipment to them. They narrowly avoided both Storm Agnes and Storm Babet, which drenched much of Wales. The idea was to demonstrate a more sustainable way of doing live music, rather than cars, planes, and trucks. They were inspired by ancient Bardic traditions, the guitar player said: “Walking like this isn’t a new idea. It’s something that has just been forgotten.”

Vintage Hello Kitty comes to US museum

The Japanese American National Museum received a “comprehensive” collection of vintage toys by Sanrio, the makers of Hello Kitty. A donor bought more than 250 items in 1976 when she was a little girl, from a Sanrio shop in California — only the second such store in the United States. A curator said that Hello Kitty was one of the first Asian icons to have gained widespread acceptance in the West, and represents a major figure in Japanese-American youth culture from the 1970s to today. The cute, well-mannered anthropomorphized cat, who according to her backstory lives in a London townhouse with her family, “represents a mascot for many Asian-American girls,” the curator said.

Cowbell row rings through Swiss village

Round-the-clock cowbell ringing caused a controversy in a small Swiss village. New arrivals in Aarwangen complained to municipal authorities about the constant noise from nearby pastures. The submission caused an uproar: 1,100 people signed a petition demanding that cow- and church-bell-ringing be protected, and the complainants either move away or stand down. But it’s not the first, nor likely the last, row about cowbells in Switzerland, The Local reported. In one town, cows must be bell-less from 10 p.m. until morning; one local court ruled that bell-ringing was a vital local custom and must be protected; and one, marvelously, ruled that cowbells do not in fact make noise, no matter what your lying ears may tell you, so residents could no longer complain about it.

Each weekend, we’ll tell you what a great independent bookstore suggests you read.

Toronto’s Type Books recommends Lisa Tuttle’s My Death. Bookseller Olivia describes it as a “a cooly unsettling read” about an author pursuing a biography of a female artist. Buy it from Type Books or your local bookshop.

Although extraordinarily tall players — such as 7’4” rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama — still find success on the court, the average height of NBA players has actually fallen since the mid-1980s. Data from last year’s season shows that those getting the most minutes are 6’5”, with those taller than seven feet or shorter than six feet getting virtually no minutes. The shorter heights could reflect a falling need for tall players — who can more easily score close to the rim — as long-range shooting has increased: Last year’s average of 35 three-point attempts per game is almost seven times higher than the 1987 average, per Basketball Reference.

Rotten Tomatoes rating of Netflix’s adaptation of All The Light We Cannot See. The on-screen adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was panned by critics, with The Guardian’s review particularly entertaining for its brutality. “It is terrible. The acting is almost uniformly bad. The dialogue gets worse and worse,” the outlet’s TV critic writes. “All nuance is lost, all thought has been excised and it feels both drearily slow and stupidly rushed.”

Our weekend roundup of the best Semafor stories you might have missed

Politics

House Republicans are asking one big question on aid for Ukraine: What’s the endgame?

Net Zero

Offshore wind projects have been held back by supply chain issues and soaring financing costs. A shortage of cables will add to the industry’s woes.

Tech

Microsoft is pushing the boundaries of small AI models, showing less expensive technology can still have advanced features without really increasing in size.

Business

Although next year’s presidential election is expected to be the most expensive ever, Wall Street mega-donors are holding back as Donald Trump surge in the polls.

Africa

Kenya’s plans for visa-free travel for Africans are fueling tensions, as informal workers in the country fear for their job safety.

Security

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are maintaining support for ties with Israel, giving the Biden administration crucial partners to try and forge a new political leadership in the Palestinian territories.