Meet Bee Arthur, the enterprising and multilingual fashion maestro and artist

Bee Arthur – the dynamic designer from Ghana whose signature blond tresses make her visible and recognizable everywhere she is present – took the fashion world by surprise back in 2001 when she won the KORA All Africa Fashion Award in Sun City, South Africa.

The journey to this illustrious fashion designer and stylistic icon began in Odessa, Ukraine where she lived and schooled as a teenager before returning to Ghana to continue her education at Alliance Française d’Accra, Wang Computer School and eventually at the University of Ghana, Legon.

Being of mixed-race heritage and born into a family of creatives (opera singers, visual artists, musicians) meant that Bee was exposed to aesthetic sensitization at a very early age both informally and formally through education and frequent visits to museums, galleries, cinema, theater and access to books on art. Throughout her teenage years in Odessa School #2, Bee was immersed in the cultural life of her school. However, she came to realize that the culture she was immersed in only reflected her Slavic heritage and not her Ghanaian roots. This realization awakened a very keen interest in African Art and specifically Fante culture when Bee returned to Ghana after high school in Odessa.

As a Diasporan looking for her Fante/Ghanaian roots, Bee combed all the arts and cultural institutions and informal art spaces in Ghana. She enrolled at the Alliance Française d’Accra where she was exposed to many artists. At the time, Alliance Française d’Accra was the main platform for art exhibitions in the West African subregion. Bee utilized fashion as an identity tool to reflect on her multicultural and multilingual persona through “sartorial” expressions, but soon realized that the Ghanaian fashion was either very traditional or totally Western. So, she decided to design her own “fusion” clothes.

As an undergraduate university student, challenged and handicapped with no formal training in couture/cutting, the all-smiling Bee sourced fabrics and designed her own styles that featured elements of her Slavic & Akan heritage. This creativity was manifested with help of seamstresses/tailors.

Bee’s personal sense of art and style was so infectious that people in her social circles and beyond encouraged her to affect fashion designing instead of the polyglot social anthropologist studies she was pursuing as an exchange student in Spain.

By 2000, Bee Arthur had obtained a BA in Sociology, Linguistics and Spanish Philology and worked as a volunteer National Service personnel at the Ghana Tourist Board. On the side, Bee Arthur designed clothes for a Ghanaian fashion brand which needed infusion of fresh ideas and quality control. In 2001 Bee Arthur was the KORA All Africa Fashion Award Winner. Thereafter, Bee became the reigning Queen of fashion in Ghana and on the continent.

 Bee Arthur’s eclectic collections went on to grace the runways of many fashion capitals on the continent and beyond that included the following events: “Afric Collection” 2010, (Cameroon), Dakar Fashion Week 2011, (Senegal), Chris Seydou Fashion Week 2011 ( Mali), Malabo Fashion Week 2012 (Equatorial Guinea), Nigeria Fashion Week 2012 (Nigeria) FAFA PanAfrican Fashion for Peace Show 2012 (Kenya), Afrik Show VIII 2013 (Côte d’IVoire), African Fashion Reception, Paris 2013 (France), among others.

In 2012, Bee Arthur became the proud recipient of the African Women of Worth Award for Excellence in Creative Fashion Design (AWOWA) and received an Excellence Award by FESMMA in Cotonou in 2013. Her creations have been featured in international magazines such as the BRUNE Magazine (France), New African Woman (UK and France editions), AMINA Magazine (France), INA Magazine (France), eBiz Africa Review (Madrid, Paris, New York), SAMVIRKE (Denmark), The Independent (UK), China Daily (China), Africa Watch, etc.

After 13 years of actively designing, the award-winning designer decided to turn her attention to other creative expressions in Television and Fine Art. She became an assistant/advisor to an Art Collector, served as a jury member for the televised talent show “Malta Guiness Street Dance Competition” and a consultant to ITC/WTO – International Trade Center, World Trade Organization. She was also a press attaché to the world-renowned sculptor extraordinaire Prof. El Anatsui.

In 2021, Prof. Christopher Richards of Brooklyn University published his academic book on iconic female Ghanaian Designers “Cosmopolitanism and Women’s Fashion in Ghana ” (Routledge) which features Bee Arthur’s garment on its book cover. The same year, Bee Arthur was invited by North Carolina Museum of Art curator Dr. Amanda Maples to join the Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA), an off-shoot of the Research Center for Decoloniality in Fashion (RCDF) headed by Dr Erica de Greef (SA) and Dr. Angela Jansen (Netherlands). The RCDF is based in South Africa.

Bee Arthur is the current leader of the Fashion Domain, Ghana Culture Forum (GCF) – a non-political civic advocacy group for Creatives under the auspices of UNESCO and the Ghana National Commission on Culture. In 2022 she founded and became the team leader of Ghana International Fashion Team (GiFt), which is an integral wing of the Global Fashioning Assembly (GFA). In 2023, the Ghana Culture Forum invited Bee Arthur to head the Fashion Domain for the period 2023 -2027.

Bee Arthur is fluent in English, French, Russian and Spanish and holds a BA in Sociology, Linguistics and Spanish Literature.

She is a known advocate of the arts and plans to help young, budding Ghanaian visual artists and designers realize their goals through workshops, exhibitions and symposia.

Posted by admin on Dec 12 2023. Filed under Artcultainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry