Nigerian designer seeks to challenge norms with gender-fluid fashion

A Nigerian designer is making waves in fashion with a gender-fluid clothing line, which he says is intended to challenge the notion that non-binary dressing is a Western concept and to defy societal norms in a country where LGBT rights are restricted.

Adeju Thompson, founder of the Lagos Space Programme brand, designs clothing that transcends traditional gender boundaries, drawing inspiration from his African heritage and personal experiences.

One of Thompson's collections was partly informed by Gelede masquerades, a Yoruba custom where men don traditional female attire in an homage to matriarchy. Thompson hopes incorporating such elements into his work can help highlight gender fluidity in Nigeria's history.

His brand has found success abroad, with pieces stocked in stores across North America, Europe and Asia.
"In Nigeria being queer isn't something that is accepted," Thompson said in an interview. "I am just expressing myself as a designer, and through my work highlight that these ideas aren't Western constructs."

Thompson joins a growing number of Nigerian designers who are seeking to create new spaces for non-binary self-expression.

Thompson said he hopes his designs will spark an "alternate African narrative" that celebrates diversity and challenges traditional views on gender and identity.

(This story has been corrected to remove the reference to Thompson's work struggling in Nigeria in paragraph 4, and to clarify context in paragraphs 3 and 6) 

By Sanni Kazeem and Vining Ogu, Reuters 

Related stories: Video - Nigeria event encourages African women to embrace natural hair

Video - Conversation with chief Nike Okundaye Africa’s queen of textile

Video - Nigeria event encourages African women to embrace natural hair

The 2023 African Hair Summit seeks to encourage more African women to embrace their natural hair. Experts say doing that is not only the healthier alternative but will also spur the growth of Africa's natural hair care sector, strengthen economies on the continent, and create jobs.

CGTN

Video - Nigeria’s Traditional Textiles Threatened by Chinese Imports

Nigeria has been producing traditional, handmade, beautiful fabric designs for centuries. But preservers of the ancient art say modern manufacturing and cheap Chinese imports threaten this way of life.

Kano’s Kofar Mata dye pit is one of the last surviving hand-coloring textile makers in Nigeria.

Over the years, the workers at the pit have become fewer and fewer due to reduced patronage.

Mamood Abubakar bends over the one-meter deep dye pit in a continuous dipping process that produces rich indigo fabrics.

Abubakar has done this for the last 70 years to earn a living and sustain the tradition, but as he gets older, he worries about the future of the trade.

"This place has been around for more than 500 years," Abubakar said. "Arabs, Whites, and people from all over Africa come here because this business is not a small one. We expect that the youth should desire to be part of it so that when we are gone, they will replace us," he says.

Not far from the Kofar Mata Dye pit is the Kantin Kwari Textile Market, the largest in Nigeria.

Ismaila Abdullahi, a designer at the market, says cheap Chinese manufacturing means it doesn’t make good business sense to produce textiles locally.

"The progress we have made in this business is that we now have our own graphic designer, who draws the designs and sends them to China for them to produce the textiles and send back to us," he said.

Hamma Kwajaffa, the director general of the Nigerian Textile Manufacturers’ Association, blames the decline in locally made fabrics on Chinese imports, which he says are often smuggled into the country. 

“They take our designs and go to China and bring it to sell it cheaper. Five yards like this, they will sell it for 1,000 naira, while our factories cannot produce this product at less than 3,000 naira. Because these smugglers they have no workers, they don’t pay taxes, they don’t add any value, so they can afford in sell it cheaper,”   he said.

Nigeria’s Central Bank said last month that it has provided cotton producers with more than $300 million in loans in recent years to support the domestic textile industry, once Africa’s largest.  

In 2017, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, filling in for the president, ordered the government to give priority to products made in Nigeria when buying uniforms and footwear.

John Adaji, the president of the National Union of Textile Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria, says the policy needs to be expanded.

“South Africa had a policy on textile and it simply said, ‘Buy South African — wear South African.’ And they have a tax in force that enforces that. So, it is government. Government must be seen to provide an enabling ground for business,”  he said.

Craftsman Abubakar says the government should buy their handmade fabrics and export them to the world if they want these traditional Nigerian textiles survive. 

By Ifiok Ettang

VOA

Video - Conversation with chief Nike Okundaye Africa’s queen of textile

African artists who have made it big on the global stage are few and far between. Among them is Chief Nike Davies Okundaye; a Nigerian professional textile artist and painter. At 68 years of age, Chief Nike as she’s fondly referred to, is an icon in her own right. With a career spanning 5 decades, the textile queen’s art pieces grace some of the most prestigious art galleries in the world and her fabrics are celebrated as contemporary jewels of traditional African art. Today, Chief Nike is on another mission: To pass on generations of knowledge and skill to the future custodians of Nigerian cultural heritage. I sat down with Chief Nike at the Nike Art Gallery in Lagos to explore her unrivalled passion for art, her mastery in the business of textiles and the Chief’s quest for cultural preservation in Africa.

Video - Nigerian fashion a source of national pride

Nigerian attires have come to be loved worldwide. They are not only fashionable, but also easy to spot anywhere. But the different Nigerian attires serve different purposes.

Video - Modern methods increase production Nigeria fabric dye industry

In central Nigeria, a fabric-dyeing culture has endured for more than 5-hundred years. To keep their businesses going, many have come up with more modern methods to dye fabric, while remaining true to the original process.

Video - Nigerian entrepreneur introduces ready-made headwrap

The Gele is a traditional Nigerian Headwrap. It is worn during special occasions.The head accessory is usually made out of heavy or stiff fabric that can be wrapped and moulded into a specific shape. Nigerian Designer Toyosi Ande is producing ready- made headwraps--revolutionizing the popular style for fashion conscious women everywhere.

Nigeria is the most stylish team in the 2018 FIFA World Cup

The World Cup has not started yet and Nigeria has already won -- for being the most stylish team in Russia.

It started with the fan frenzy to to buy the Nigeria Nike-designed World Cup kit, which sold out globally on the day it was released, with queues snaking round the block outside the Nike store on London's Regent Street.

Football fans queue outside Nike store in Oxford, London for the newly released Nigerian kits designed by Nike for the 2018 World Cup on June 1, 2018.

Nigeria had heads turning again for the team's outfits as they arrived in style ahead of the tournament in Russia. 

Fans are talking about their stunning white and green ensemble set off with a matching hat, worn at a jaunty angle.

The Super Eagles, as the team is known, arrived looking crisp in starched white traditional attire, known locally as the kaftan.

The knee-length white shirt was embroidered with a green eagle representing the country's green, white, green colors.

 
Social media was quick to react after the National Football Federation shared the images online.
There was so much chatter online that Twitter dedicated a 'moment' to it.

Twitter user Kirekaboy wrote: "Has anybody seen how the Nigerian team was dressed as they landed in Russia?...I have never seen a people so proud of their culture." While another wrote: "Nigeria's World Cup squad rocking that slick cricket umpire meets confident gospel choir singer look. Just give these guys the trophy now." 

There's no denying the love for the Nigerian players' outfits as they prepare for the start of the World Cup tournament on June 14. 

Nigeria's Nike-designed kit was voted the best of the World Cup in several polls, including UK broadcaster Sky. 

International men's magazine GQ also voted the Super Eagles strip top the best of all the 32 teams in Russia. 

The highly-sought after kit received three million pre-orders before it's release, according to Nigerian Football Federation.

'Nigerian swagger'

Design director Peter Hopkins told Fader magazine that the Nigerian team's confidence inspired him in his designs for the kit which has a bold neon green pattern that echoes the pattern of eagle wing feathers.

He said: "There's a confidence in all these young players, they're going to go for it and we were attracted to that."

"We've been following them from afar, and the players on social media...a lot of them are playing in some of the top clubs in Europe, and there's that boldness that aligns in Nigeria and Lagos and in London.

"We thought that there's something in here to do something different," Hopkins added. 

The kit has also been the subject of intense discussions in Nigeria where some people thought the football federation had missed an opportunity to boost local manufacturing.

One prominent politician said outsourcing the kits to be produced outside the country contradicted the Nigerian government's plans to expand and encourage production of 'Made in Nigeria' goods.
Senator Ben Bruce said the country could have made $100 million if the kit was made in Nigerian factories. 

The lawmaker said,"Just imagine if those 3 million Nigerian Super Eagles jerseys were made by a firm in Aba (a Nigerian state famed for local manufacturing) rather than Nike. Aba tailors have the capacity to produce them. 

"We just lost an opportunity to infuse at least $100 million into the Nigerian economy and provide jobs for our youths," he said.

Made by Nigeria for Nigerians

However, some enterprising young Nigerians have seized the initiative and are looking to cash in on the vacuum created by the sold out official Nike jerseys. 

One example is the 'Unity Collection," created by Chekwas Okafor, founder of e-commerce site OnChek in collaboration with designer Adebayo Oke-Lawal of Orange Culture and footwear designer Shem Paronelli.

The designers said they wanted to pay homage to the Super Eagles with their version of the jersey.
Okafor told CNN he conceived the idea to make jerseys for the national team back in 2014 when he noticed that Nigerian creatives were not active in the sports industry.

 
"My goal was to show that we can leverage our creative industry to make products like jerseys. We only stocks brands on our site that make their products in Africa. I also want to show that we could make similar products in Nigeria, in large scale," he says. 

The Unity kit is more than a jersey, it is also a medium to tell the Nigerian story, he adds.
"The Unity collection is made up of many parts, it tells a story of differences, cultures, traditions, and dialects. It's a story about the one thing that brings us together. A story about unity. The story of Nigeria."

CNN

The story behind Nigeria's World Cup jersey craze

After the sort of long lead-up that can only accompany a once-every-four-years tourney, the World Cup will officially commence next week. Every sports angle's been dissected—which means we can turn to more important ideas, like the fact that the jerseys are, at long last, getting their official releases. And this go-round, undoubtedly the most exciting and anticipated of these jerseys belongs to Nigeria’s national team. 

The kits are a genuine fashion item: there are a couple versions but the favorite features an unripe-lime green in the body with white-and-black sleeves and jagged vertical stripes that are meant to resemble the wings of the team’s mascot, the Super Eagles (but look a little bit like Mario Kart turbo pads). The jersey looks less like a traditional soccer kit than a hyped-up sneaker—particularly the coveted Nike design seen on Acronym’s version of the Vapormax. And the response has been fitting: the jersey has been near-unanimously considered the coolest of this year’s crop ever since it was unveiled in February, and it’s turned from a piece of athletic gear to rarest-provenance streetwear.

Since that February reveal, the jersey’s picked up an alleged three million pre-orders (more on that later), sold out at Supreme box logo speeds, and is now reselling like one of those BOGO tees on the secondary market. Every day ultra-limited sneakers and items from hyped up streetwear brands trade back and forth on secondary platforms like Grailed or StockX, but it’s unusual for a soccer jersey to find its way onto the secondary market. In a World Cup cycle that’s also seen themed releases from Virgil Abloh and Kim Jones, one of the coolest pieces of tournament gear is a regular-degular jersey. How did that happen?

Great design, to start. But once everyone caught on to the jersey’s appeal—especially in comparison to something like England’s jersey, plain white with a badge on the breast, which was revealed alongside Nigeria’s kit—the shirt was sent through the hype machine. Twitter users were enamored with the jersey and started spreading images of it around, it got picked up on streetwear blogs, and was worn by grime star and stylish man Skepta months before going on sale to the general public. 

Then Nike came out and announced that three million people had already bought the jerseys before they were even released. As Quartz notes, analysts were skeptical of those figures since there wasn’t any apparent way to even buy the kits when that was announced—and three million is more than what Manchester United, the most beloved football club in the world, sold in all of 2017. Still, this didn’t stop the internet from going after these jerseys with serious hypebeast passion.

The Nigeria jersey provides a case study in how the streetwear internet works in 2018: cool-looking object gets hyped up endlessly until its coolness is a fact carved into stone. We’ve seen this happen countless times, sure—just not usually with a soccer jersey. But it does feel about time for soccer to have a moment like this. Remember that just a couple years ago Drake Instagrammed himself in a pink jersey from the Italian club Juventus, bumping sales for that particular kit. And soccer has been the inspiration for other designers in the fashion world: Gosha Rubchinskiy collaborated with Adidas on several kits and labels like Versace and Burberry have taken inspiration from the sport in recent collections. 

When Abloh released his collection of soccer gear with Nike he noted how the sport had a defined visual identity. “The great thing about the vocabulary and history of football is that aesthetically it has its own look,” he said.

The Nigeria jerseys seem to tap into what designers already knew: soccer is fashion, or at least a sport worthy of being mined for fashion inspiration and turned into luxury soccer scarfs or streetwear-adjacent jerseys. And so why shouldn’t a team have jerseys befitting that status? When the Super Eagles line up against Croatia in Russia next week, they’ll certainly be the best-dressed dudes on the field. And if and when they make their exit from the tournament, they’ll be able to cushion the blow by flipping their jerseys on eBay.

GQ

Related stories: Nigeria Super Eagles World Cup kit revealed

Nigeria 2018 World Cup kit enjoying huge demand

Video - Nigerian braided wigs offer hairstylists a share in the hair market

And to the fashion industry, African women spend billions of dollars annually on hair products. Nigeria is one of the biggest spenders in the continent. The west Africa giant spends more than $400 million but with hardly any product to sell in the lucrative beauty market. But the emergence of locally made braided wigs could offer a rare chance for Nigerian hairstylists to earn a share of the hair market.

Video - Designers awake to new age of "modest" couture in Nigeria

In Nigeria women who like to dress modestly have found a place in the fashion industry. An alternative catwalk, which showcases full-body couture, is growing in popularity - especially among Muslim women.