Show Notes
This week’s Lagos Fashion Week campaign is a series of portraits drawing on the tradition of African studio photography. They were shot by the creative director Daniel Obasi.
Few people have done more to shape how the world sees Lagos. Louis Vuitton asked Obasi to photograph the city for its Fashion Eye series. Beyoncé’s team brought him in to style the Lagos shoot for Black Is King. His work has run in Vogue Italia and The Face — and last year he joined the BoF 500.
Yet he built his career in a city where many creatives have to find their own way. Lagos, he says, produces remarkably resilient talent, partly because formal training is still hard to come by. Amed sat down with Obasi at his creative studio AMAH in Lagos to talk about how a city with so few easy paths forges so many extraordinary creatives, and what it would take to give the next generation an easier path.
Key Insights: Obasi traces Nigeria’s missing contemporary visual identity to a culture of leaving. Growing up, he says, there was a constant need to leave the country, which he links to post-independence politics and a civil war that was never properly addressed. “Aspiration became a way to heal as opposed to let us actually sit with the uncomfortable truth about what has happened,” he says.
His work began as an answer to questions he couldn’t find images for. Researching references as a graphic designer, he struggled to find strong imagery of Nigeria. He also questioned why Nigerians equated luxury with foreign brands: “Why does luxury feel so detached for Nigerians?” He says francophone filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène showed it was possible to tell contemporary stories without diluting their culture.
He builds images from words, not mood boards. A copywriting course taught him to cut a paragraph down to a single word or phrase. He says he talks ideas out and sketches them with an illustrator before gathering references. “Before I even touch a mood board, I would write,” he says, adding that mood boards can give him creative block.
Obasi sees Lagos’ resilience as both a strength and a cost. He recalls someone describing Lagos to him as a “creative factory” that builds strong people. The flip side, he says, is that many creatives have to find their own way, though he credits Lagos Fashion Week and Art X Lagos with filling part of the gap. “I know a lot of young designers who haven’t gone to fashion schools, but they’re making clothes at an extremely high standard,” he says, adding that he wishes they had an easier path through established training.
His advice to young Lagos creatives is to keep going and look beyond home for support. Obasi tells them to learn from each mistake and move on. “The support you’re looking for oftentimes might not come from your immediate community,” he says. “It might come from somewhere else. But eventually they will come around.”
Additional Resources: Worldview | Omoyemi Akerele Takes Lagos Fashion Week to the Next Level | BoF The Gatekeepers to Nigeria’s Fashion Market | BoF Daniel Obasi | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from The Business of Fashion Podcast
For years, a coveted pair of Air Jordans could send sneaker fans into a frenzy. But when Nike brought back the black-and-blue Air Jordan 1 Royal this month, the response was muted — days after release, the shoe was still available in several sizes, with some pairs reselling below retail.
For most of the last 30 years, the American department store has been a story of decline: store closures, bankruptcies, endless discounting and floors packed with racks that looked the same from one store to the next. Bloomingdale’s is starting to tell a different story. Last quarter, its comparable sales grew more than 11 percent, its second consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, at a moment when much of the luxury industry is struggling to grow at all. The man behind that turnaround is Olivier Bron, who arrived in New York nearly three years ago to become the CEO of the venerable department store chain that had lost its lustre. Bron believes that Bloomingdale’s can still matter to shoppers and to brands, but only if it gives people a reason to walk in. This week, Bron joins Imran Amed to talk about how you make a brand every American knows desirable again, and why some of luxury’s biggest brands are wrestling with exactly the same question. Key Insights:
Fashion has long been obsessed with youth, treating young shoppers as both trendsetters and the engine of growth. Yet brands including Evereve, Ulla Johnson, Frances Valentine and Poppy & Peonies are finding opportunities in catering to women in their 40s, 50s and beyond, a demographic with significant spending power and brand loyalty that rarely features prominently in fashion campaigns.
This week, by popular demand, we are back for the third installment of Ask Me Anything, where listeners from around the world send in their most pressing questions about what is happening in the fashion business.
A $15,000 mechanical bird named Molly has become an unlikely flashpoint for retail. After pop star Kelly Clarkson accused Brooklyn boutique Art of Play of treating her “like Julia Roberts’ character” in Pretty Woman, the dispute ignited a much bigger debate about customer service, training and who bears the brunt of bad retail experiences.