Cyrus Kabiru’s C-Stunners Hit MaXhosa’s Paris Runway

Kenyan visual artist Cyrus Kabiru’s sculptural C-Stunners appeared on selected looks at Paris Fashion Week's MaXhosa Africa's Spring/Summer 2027 show, titled Izihlwele Zivumile, isiXhosa for “the ancestors have approved.” The clothes made headlines on their own. The glasses are the part of the story worth lingering on.

Kabiru, born in 1984 and raised in Eastlands, is a self-taught visual artist whose work sits inside the broader Afrofuturist movement.

C-Stunners, the eyewear sculptures that made his name, are built entirely from found and discarded material, wire, bottle caps, scrap metal, and electrical parts, assembled into pieces too irregular and oversized to function as actual glasses. He has been making versions of them since childhood, though the series only became widely known around 2011 and 2012, documented in a long run of striking self-portraits.

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Kabiru's upcycled eyewear became the only African contribution instead, worn by models on select looks within the collection. There is no detailed public account of exactly how the two connected, but the shape of it is clear enough from the coverage: an artistic invitation built into a pan-African styling brief, Nairobi scrap finding its way onto a South African label’s historic Paris runway.