Afro Dandyism dress code: How the SAMAs are localising fashion’s biggest cultural moment

When the South African Music Awards (SAMAs) announced “Afro Dandyism” as this year’s dress code, with the accompanying line that “true style is all in the storytelling”, it set a fashion brief for the Sun City Superbowl and positioned the annual event’s red carpet to retain its spot as one of the most dissected nights on the local entertainment calendar.

While the Dandyism dress code is nothing new, adding the “Afro” prefix to the 32nd South African Music Awards (SAMA32) includes South Africa in a conversation that has been building since May 2025, when the Met Gala turned its blue carpet over to Black Dandyism for the first time in the event’s history.

The designers already speaking this language A handful of South African labels have been doing versions of Afro Dandyism for years, long before it had a name attached to an awards show: Wanda Lephoto – The Johannesburg menswear label’s “Black Renaissance” collection is arguably the closest local blueprint for the theme, reworking uniforms of colonial and religious authority – including a khaki biker jacket inspired by the Zion Christian Church uniform his own father wore – into pieces about inherited identity and reclaimed authority.