Using the second phase of a two-year-long project called the Drum Magazine Project as a case study, this paper responds to how we can address cultural pride and preservation of uniqueness in a globalised world. Drawing inspiration from the landmark South African magazine, the project embarked on a process of teaching South African fashion history through archives from this magazine. Building on the first phase’s focus on the 1950s and 1960s, the second phase included students working with theories of translocality (Hughes 2022) and the ‘Afro’ fashion look (Ford 2015) to study 1970s fashion in Johannesburg as an expression of translocal subjectivities.