KikoRomeo's Iona McCreath joins Yale's cultural heritage fellowship — and takes 31 years of Kenyan fashion history with her

There is a coat in KikoRomeo's current collection that is not, strictly speaking, a coat. Made from 100% cotton industrial waste and hand-painted by Sudanese fine artist Eltayeb Dawelbait in his Nairobi studio, each piece bears a unique symbol on the back. No two are the same. No two can be.

That garment is, in a single object, the entire argument of what KikoRomeo has spent 31 years building: that fashion at its most serious is inseparable from art, from craft, from the hands and histories of the people who make it. And it is precisely that argument — now spanning three decades of garments, textiles, photographs, samples and material experiments — that Yale University wants to help preserve.

On 8 September 2026, Yale's Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage announced that Iona McCreath, Director of Special Projects at KikoRomeo, has been selected for the second cohort of the Yale Directors Forum, a 12-month international fellowship for cultural heritage leaders. She is Kenya's representative in a cohort of 12 fellows drawn from nine countries across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Who Iona McCreath is and what she carries into this fellowship

Iona McCreath grew up in KikoRomeo's workshop — a lifelong apprentice in the most literal sense of the phrase. She studied at UAL Central Saint Martins and read sociology at the London School of Economics before stepping into the role of Creative Director in 2018, when founder Ann McCreath, her mother, began transitioning leadership of the house she had built from a garage in Nairobi in 1996.

KikoRomeo, a derivative of the Kiswahili word for Adam's apple, was founded in 1996 and has since earned a double-page spread in Vogue Italia — arguably the ultimate fashion recognition. Born in Scotland to a Scottish father and South African mother, Ann McCreath resigned as a designer at global retailer Mango in the early 1990s after what she describes as an unethical task, then took a three-month assignment with Doctors Without Borders to Kenya in 1992 — an experience that motivated her to launch KikoRomeo as a vehicle for economic and social development through fashion. Kenyayearbook
Industrie Africa

In 2018, Iona McCreath, who had grown up in the workshop as a lifelong apprentice, stepped into the role of creative director. What she inherited was not just a fashion house. It was a living archive of Kenyan design — handwoven textiles, batik, beadwork, explorations of indigenous and natural fibres, garments that document three decades of craft practice and cultural dialogue. OMIREN STYLES

What the Yale Directors Forum is and why it matters

The Yale Directors Forum is not a ceremonial appointment. It is a working fellowship — a 12-month programme through which cultural heritage leaders from across the Global South develop expertise, build professional networks, and strengthen their institutions' capacity to care for collections and living traditions alike.

The fellowship comes at an important time for KikoRomeo. The Nairobi-based fashion house is now in its 31st year after its founder, Ann McCreath, established the brand in 1996. Over three decades, KikoRomeo has built a body of work around African design, craft, sustainability and local production. 

To date the programme has had 16 fellows, trained more than 80 professionals and supported the establishment of eight conservation centres across Africa. The second cohort extends those connections to include the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean — fellows from Jamaica, Brazil and Panama joining colleagues from Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Togo.

Charlotte Ashamu, Director of International Programs at Yale IPCH, described the cohort's scope: 

"The fellows represent institutions ranging from community-based heritage sites and cultural centres to leading museums, as well as practitioners working to sustain rich traditions in areas such as cuisine and textile design. Together, they bring perspectives from institutions stewarding cultural collections and those preserving living traditions in their communities."

What Iona is taking to Yale — and what she hopes to bring back

KikoRomeo has developed an archive containing garments, textiles, samples, photographs and material experiments. These materials document the growth of the fashion house and part of Kenya's contemporary fashion history. McCreath now wants to find better ways to preserve and use that history. 

She has been direct about the stakes of that work. 

"Being selected for the Yale Directors Forum Fellowship comes at an incredibly meaningful moment for both me and KikoRomeo," she said. "We are in our 31st year and this has got me thinking deeply about what it means to steward the body of work, material knowledge and relationships that have been built over that time, and how we ensure they remain relevant and accessible for generations to come."

The fellowship, she says, is specifically an opportunity to develop the frameworks needed to preserve and activate KikoRomeo's archive more intentionally — while learning alongside cultural leaders from across the world. "I hope to use the experience to strengthen KikoRomeo's role not only as a fashion house, but as a living repository of Kenyan design, textile practice and cultural memory — one that can support research, education, creative practice and new forms of cultural exchange."

That ambition is larger than one fashion house. KikoRomeo's archive is not simply a corporate record. The brand is built on sustainable natural fibres, artisanal craft and pan-African sourcing relationships, collaborating with a wide network of Kenyan weavers, embroiderers and beadwork artisans. What it has documented across 31 years is a significant chapter of Kenya's creative and cultural history — and the question of how that material is preserved, made searchable and made usable by future designers, researchers and educators is one with consequences well beyond Westlands. 

The company Iona keeps in the 2026 cohort

The second cohort of Yale Directors Forum fellows places KikoRomeo in genuinely distinguished company. Among the 12 selected are Aisha Adamu Augie, Director-General of Nigeria's Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation; Sylvia Arthur, founder of the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora in Ghana; Jess Kilubukila, who works with communities in the DRC to preserve Kuba textile heritage; and Batana Vundla, Executive Director of Eyethu Heritage Hall — a cultural institution rooted in one of South Africa's earliest Black-owned cinemas. Faith Anderson leads Liberty Hall, Jamaica's only museum dedicated to Marcus Garvey's life and legacy. Raquel Barreto is Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro.

Across the full cohort, what connects the fellows is not an institutional category but a shared conviction: that what communities have made, practised and passed down across generations is worth protecting with the same rigour as any other form of knowledge.

Iona McCreath, representing Kenyan fashion at Yale, is making exactly that argument. And she arrives with 31 years of evidence behind her.