HELMOND, THE NETHERLANDS — Internet connectivity across much of Africa can be mind-numbingly slow and unreliable, but that hasn’t stopped about 9,000 young, affluent women from braving the sluggish system to discuss something that matters a great deal to them: the latest design trends from a luxury fabric brand called Vlisco.

Gathering online from cities in Angola, Senegal, Ghana, Benin and the like, their friendly banter in a smattering of French, English and Portuguese on Vlisco’s Facebook fan page focuses on the minutiae of a label that appears to be unmistakably African — and that has been sold by local vendors to wealthy and well-off Africans for more than a century.

But what makes the brand’s distinctive, double-sided, wax-printed cotton fabric so remarkable is that it is designed and manufactured in a small, rather nondescript town in southern Holland.

To the uninitiated in the West — and, indeed, to many Africans — the adulation heaped on this Dutch colonial-era company by the latest generation of cosmopolitan and upwardly mobile Africans might seem misplaced.