Wrap & Chat: Anna Marie Benedict

Episode 2.

Guest: Anna Marie Benedict, Press & Creative Director, African Fashion Week London (AFWL)

African Fashion Week London (AFWL)

• Anna Marie’s top 3 required skills to do her role:

  1) Persistence / perseverance - key life and professional skills one should harness, as they are valuable assets to a person’s character.

  2) Don’t take things personally.

  3) Be adaptable, as you will wear many hats.

Whilst our ships have passed each other several times over email (due to COVID-19’s enforced virtual world event planning), it was a blessing to finally meet Anna Marie over Zoom and then again in real life recently. Speaking of the online meeting/event platform, I did ask Anna Marie what were the underrated tools that are indispensable for her job? (in no particular order):

• Canva

• Zoom (how did you guess)

• Laptop / mobile (‘cellphone’ for my North American family)

With such a busy hands-on role as Press & Creative Director, having to adapt in a rapidly changing world - as alluded to earlier in the top 3 skills - has served both Anna Marie and AFWL well; setting the latter up for an expanded business model that will most definitely prove lucrative.

This relates to AFWL’s creative partnership with Henley Business School Centre for Entrepreneurship, Reading, UK and Parsons School of Design and Technology | The New School, located in New York, USA. In its inaugural year, due to the pandemic’s impact, the intensive collaborative course ‘Fashion Futures’ for fashion entrepreneurs was transitioned to a 100% online study programme. As an alumni, I can confirm the course truly pushed the students to dispense with our traditional framework of creative thinking and instead, understand how transformable the impacts of technology (in all its facets including design trends, fabric/yarn intelligence and the advancement of the Internet of Things IoT), can support and scale a creative business for the 21st century onwards.

In and around the rollout of the above, whilst still planning the seasonal shows, Anna Marie’s downtime during lockdown included getting out daily in the fresh air around Regent’s Park, London, with her colleague Michael Burgess, Director of Business Development and Partnerships. For Anna Marie, having a valued support system was key to maintaining her positive emotional and mental health wellbeing. In addition, Anna Marie loves to read and her top 3 book recommendations are:

1. The Famished Road, Ben Okri

2. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X & Alex Haley

3. Perfume, Patrick Süskind (Not read this book yet but the film seduces you into the world of olfaction)

Click the link and listen to episode 2 of Wrap & Chat: Culture in Conversation to hear more about what Anna Marie had to say.

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