Raffia is having a moment: in hats, in bags, in the earrings everyone suddenly seems to be wearing. But most people who buy it could not tell you what it actually is, or why a piece the size of your palm can weigh almost nothing.
Here is the short answer, and then the longer one.
The short answer
Raffia is a natural fibre stripped from the leaves of the raffia palm. It is not straw, not paper, not synthetic. It is a plant fibre, and it behaves like one: it takes dye deeply, it holds a shape when it is coiled or woven, and it stays light no matter how large the piece gets.
Where raffia comes from
Raffia palms belong to the genus Raphia, which grows across tropical Africa, including Nigeria where our pieces are made, as well as Madagascar, which is the best-known commercial source. The palms carry some of the longest leaves in the plant kingdom, and it is those leaves that the fibre is taken from.
The process is old and entirely manual. The leaflets are cut, and the fine membrane on the underside is stripped away in long ribbons. Those ribbons are dried, which is when raffia takes on the pale straw colour most people picture. Then they are sorted by width, dyed, and only then woven.
Nothing about it is fast. There is no machine step that replaces the hand.
Raffia is a textile tradition, not just a trim
It is easy to think of raffia as a summer accessory material, but in Central and West Africa it has been a cloth fibre for centuries. The Kuba people of Central Africa wove raffia into textiles of remarkable geometric complexity: cloth that was used ceremonially, worn, given, and inherited.
That lineage matters when you hold a woven raffia earring. The coiling and weaving techniques used to build a small bell or a flat disc are the same family of techniques used to build a mat or a basket. The object is small; the craft behind it is not.
Raffia versus straw
They get used interchangeably and they should not be.
Straw is usually the dried stalk of a cereal grass: wheat, rye, rice. It is stiff, it is hollow, and it splinters when you bend it too far.
Raffia is a leaf fibre. It is flat, flexible, and slightly waxy, which is why it can be braided into a fine cord or coiled into a dense dome without snapping. It also takes dye far better than straw does: the colour goes into the fibre rather than sitting on top of it.
If you have ever wondered why a raffia piece holds a saturated fuchsia or a deep indigo while a straw hat stays beige, that is the reason.
Why raffia works so well for earrings
This is the part that surprises people.
A statement earring made of metal has a hard ceiling on size, because at some point the weight pulls at the lobe and you stop wearing it by nine o’clock. Raffia removes that ceiling. A woven disc the width of your palm weighs almost nothing, so the scale reads as bold while the weight never becomes the problem.
That is the whole argument for raffia jewellery, and it is a practical one rather than a romantic one: you can wear something genuinely large all evening and forget it is there.
The second argument is that no two pieces are identical. Because the fibre is dyed as a raw material and then woven by hand, the depth of colour and the tension of the weave shift slightly from piece to piece. It is not a flaw in the process. It is the evidence that there was a process.
How to care for raffia
Raffia is a plant fibre, and it wants what plant fibres want.
- Keep it dry. Water, perfume and hairspray will dull the colour over time. Put your earrings on after your perfume, not before.
- Store it with room. Flat or hanging, not crushed at the bottom of a bag.
- Reshape it with your fingers. If a woven piece flattens, press it gently back into shape. The fibre has memory and will hold.
- Do not wash it. If it needs cleaning, a dry soft brush is enough.
Treated this way, raffia lasts for years. Treated like plastic, it fades.
Where our raffia comes in
We work with two hand-craft traditions from Nigeria. One is Adire, the indigo resist-dyed cotton hand-dyed in Abeokuta, which we cut into dresses, kaftans and sets. The other is raffia, hand-dyed and hand-woven into jewellery.
Each shape in the accessories collection is its own object rather than a variation on one idea:
- Zuri: a woven half-moon on a long braided cord, in five hand-dyed colours.
- Sanaa: an oversized disc, its outer ring left the natural colour of the fibre, with a dyed fan opening at the centre.
- Sade: a coiled bell, built row by row, hung from a fine braided cord.
- Ayanna: a small tiered basket, the quietest of the set.
- Zahara: a coiled teardrop in burnt amber.
All of them hang from stainless steel ear wires, and all of them weigh next to nothing.
If you want to see how they sit against print, our guide to styling raffia earrings with African print covers it.