Tanya Nefertari

Tanya Nefertari is the brain child & clothing label by Tanya Mushayi the young Zimbabwean designer building her brand through social media. The fashion fanatic started out making clothes for herself wearing her own designs & blogging about them. Now her label is one of the favourites amongst Zimbabwe's style savvy crowd.

Tanya was born in Zimbabwe but moved to Manchester when she had just turned 11 to join her mother who’d moved over to study and work. “I kind of lost my way a bit when I was a teenager cos it’s kinda hard when you move to a different country, you don’t know which culture to relate to. You don’t know which culture is your culture. Manchester is still home to me, I can’t say that it’s not home. In a way I have two homes,” she explains.

Her love of colour and design influenced her studies. She did a diploma in art and design at college and, inspired by hip hop culture, got into customising. “I used to do abstract pieces - repeat a pattern, or take sections of a picture and then repeat it and then put it onto shoes and jackets. But I didn’t know that I could actually do a course on surface design until my teacher said.” A degree at Huddersfield followed but two years into the course she decided to move back to Zimbabwe.

“My mum was talking about moving back to Zimbabwe but she wanted me to stay to finish the course as I only had one year left. But I didn’t feel I was learning much so I explained to her I wanted to start my own thing, I wanted to go back to Zimbabwe.” Tanya saw it as an opportunity to not only strike out on her own but also to build up the Zimbabwean fashion industry.

Tanya attributes that drive to her mum, who brought her up on her own. “When she used to say she was going to do something, she did it. She never procrastinates, she just knows what she’s going to do and she does it. I think I got that from her. It’s something that you’re not really taught - it’s something that you observe and start doing it yourself.”

In the future she wants to INVEST in a screen printer to make her own fabrics. “We have a Zimbabwean bird - that’s our national symbol, so I would love to do something with that. I’ll make my own new print and then hopefully it’d be called the Zimbabwean print.”