By Damilola Fatunmise
Lights, camera, action!
The 11th edition of The Reconnect Abuja was an event embedded with lots of fun, innovation, beautiful runway setups, elegant designs and daring fashion designers.
The annual event, which always delivers as one of the biggest fashion and art showcases in the FCT, raised the bar again, and this time it shed the spotlight on a few select fashion brands and designers that leveraged the platform to display their unique products. Furthermore, the event also featured the best of art performances, with stalls open to all types of vendors to sell their products at discounted rates and network for collaboration purposes.
Fashion enthusiasts and critics present fed their eyes and souls to the several delish designs tailored to manifest the essence of the Nigerian heritage and embody the purest form of art.
The fashion brands that showcased brought their A-game ticking boxes that included packaging, creativity, tailoring, details and cleanliness of cuts and patterns, and presentation which was stylishly done by beautiful models.
The intentionality with which a few brands delivered glamourous products caught people’s attention, but one brand that got everyone talking is Zurad Clothiers. The brand tailored its designs to reflect a fusion of authenticity, luxury and chic. It created a few unique designs that reinvented the Nigerian fashion heritage by elevating its choice of fabric, Ankara and Adire, to adequately express the lifestyle and personality of contemporary women.
Zurad Clothiers is owned by Adejumoke Yetunde Alade, whose expertise as a product developer and fashion illustrator, shone exclusively like a million stars. Her array of designs was bliss to sight at first glance, while a deeper look gave insight into her thought process. The choice of colours and alignment of patterns according to the prints on each distinct fabric duly complemented each final product.
Zurad Clothiers showed consistency to its brief, all products were dresses of different types with distinctive features that allow for flexibility for all types of events.
The short dresses paid homepage to the skin of the African woman, while the long ones adorned her curves. Cottons were used to make Plisse where necessary, and the splits were at lengths that allowed for comfort with simple fashion accessories that adorned them. Explaining the concept of the designs, Adejumoke said, “People warm up to imported fabric materials as the source of luxury in fashion, when there are indeed locally made materials that are rich in history and heritage, which with the right amount of creativity can become a major product of export and boost our fashion industry. We chose the fabrics and the designs to let people know that fashion is an art that’s created to appraise your appearance and personality. It is the fashion designer and the customer that determine the worth of fabric, through their skill and charisma, proportionally. We are building a trend that allows people to embrace locally sourced fabrics for special occasions, without attributing it as cheap.”