One morning in 1995, Joyce Ababio stood in a rented room in Asylum Down. She taught her first class to five students.
The school had no accreditation, no second building, and no name yet beyond Vogue Style School of Fashion and Design. Several students turned down admission to the University of Ghana at Legon to be there. Others were pushed toward Legon by their families and refused to go.
Their parents were furious about it. The parents were not happy about the child not going to Legon, Ababio said. She spent years less as an instructor and more as a defense witness, answering for a decision she hadn’t made. Rather than argue with them, she decided to make the students good enough that arguing stopped making sense. She said, ‘I made sure you entered that institution and finished well.’ Years later, the same families who objected came around because their children had shops and money to show for it. “They see some benefit now,” she said.
Ababio herself attended Achimota School, the institution that has fed much of Ghana’s professional class since independence. She left the country for university abroad and eventually returned to start the school anyway. Parents who opposed their children’s skipping Legon argued with a woman who had already chosen the same path. They did so without fully realizing it.
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What began in that rented room is now JACCD Design Institute Africa. It is a fully accredited university in North Legon. Ababio has trained twenty thousand students since that first morning. Some of the biggest names in Ghanaian fashion trace back to her classrooms, among them Ophelia Crossland, Christie Brown, and Pistis, labels that now anchor the industry she was once fighting to get parents to take seriously.
In 2000, Ababio moved the school to Osu, where it stayed for seventeen years, until Ghana’s Tertiary Education Commission ruled that the building sat too close to the road, the stretch running from Osu toward Independence Square and on to Labadi, and she was forced to relocate. She found space in Cantonments, and it was there that the school began offering diploma courses for the first time, a compliance order having pushed her, almost by accident, toward becoming a university.
She resisted for years the idea of shortening the program to make it more convenient. “I wasn’t even willing to do the six-month program,” she said. “I felt like there was a lot to learn, and you couldn’t do it in six months.” She has since added a six-month track, mostly for designers already working in the trade who never properly learned pattern drafting or fabric behaviour the first time around, but the one-year course came first, built from the same instinct that made her hold her ground with those early parents: nobody was going to graduate half-finished.
Between 1995 and 2001, she designed for nearly every Miss Ghana contestant, and a rumour took hold in the pageant world that wearing her clothes was the surest way to win. It wasn’t magic so much as vetting: before she agreed to dress a contestant, she interviewed her, checking whether the woman had what she considered real Miss Ghana material, building her own name in the process. “They just didn’t know that part of it,” she said. “They just assumed some magic hands, and you just win as long as you wear my clothes.” One of her designs, worn by a Ghanaian delegate, went on to win the best formal evening wear award at Miss World.
Three of her first five students still run their own shops, and one moved to the United States; Ababio has kept up with all of them for thirty years. Former students still message her, unprompted, whenever something goes right in their lives. “Auntie, I am doing this and that,” they write, and she writes back.
