By Christy Anyanwu

Wife of the Ooni of Ife, Olori Ronke Ademiluyi Ogunwusi, is a lawyer and African fashion entrepreneur. Recently, she spoke with passion to some select journalists about Nigeria’s indigenous fabric, popularly called Adire. She highlighted aspects of Yoruba fashion and explained the dangers of wearing faux Adire. She also took a trip down memory lane, including the founding of Africa Fashion Week London and Africa Fashion Week Nigeria, and her stance as the CEO of the Adire Oduduwa Textile Training and Production Hub in Ile-Ife, Osun State.
In this interview with Daily Sun, she gave insights on the way forward to make Adire fabric more sustainable for Nigerians and foreigners alike.

 

You have great passion for African wear and this has culminated in your founding Africa Fashion Week London and Africa Fashion Week Nigeria, could you tell us more about these shows?

This year is our 14th edition in London and our 10th edition in Nigeria. It’s all about promoting the creative talents out of Africa. Prior to us starting Africa Fashion Week London in 2011, there wasn’t a platform that showcased the talents of our creatives in Africa. And if you look at the work that they do, the artisans, the designers, the creatives, if you see the wonderful things they do, there must be a platform to showcase them. Because, for creativity to grow, there must be a platform that showcases and promotes its growth. If you create something and you leave it in your house without exposing it to the world, it’s not going to grow. Nobody’s going to know about it. And at some point, you’re going to get so frustrated because, when you create something, yes, you’re driven by passion, but to enable it become sustainable, to enable it to outlive you, you know, you must commercialise it, unless you have billions somewhere that you’re thinking about. And even if you have billions somewhere, if we put billions in this room and we don’t add to it and we’re taking from it, some day it will finish. And that was why we created Africa Fashion Week London and Nigeria so that our creatives, our own African designers would be able to have a platform to thrive that they call their own. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the past 14 years, both in London and Nigeria. We know that Nigeria is the fashion hub of Africa, especially Lagos. So, any fashion that comes out of Nigeria, the world, the African continent, tends to grab it.

Are you saying Nigeria is leading when it comes to fashion and styles in Africa?

Oh, yes, definitely. Didn’t you see our last Ojude Oba festival in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State? The world embraced it. Just looking at the colours, the culture, the vibrancy of the fashion, you are amazed by the beauty of our culture, and that event trended all over the world.

So, yes, we are the leading voice when it comes to fashion out of Africa and then African fashion to a global market as well. I can proudly say we’re the leading voice.
You can see the way that Aso Oke was displayed with pomp and pageantry.
We intend to have one of the shows inspired by the Ojude Oba festival in Africa Fashion Week London this year.

How?

We are going to have some designers create designs inspired by the looks, the colours from the Ojude Oba festival and put it on the runway. Yes, just to create more awareness for it. Like storytelling.

Could you explain more about traditional fabrics and royal regalia?

We all know that our Adiré is trending at the moment. What I wear, some things I wear, are Adiré and people don’t even believe it’s Adiré. So traditional fabric is something to talk about; Adiré and other traditional fabrics of Africa, like the kente, the mud cloth, and fabrics like that. And then the royal regalia, of course. I’m a royal, so I have to try to infuse my royalty into anything we do at Africa Fashion Week. Because that’s who we are. As Africans, our fashion is part of our DNA. It’s our identity. And we must wear it with pride and showcase it with pride as well. The fact is that we are very stylish.

For Africa Fashion Week London, are we looking at designers from other parts of Africa or just Nigeria?

Oh, no, no, we’ve always had designers from other parts of Africa, Botswana, Jamaica, Ghana and South Africa.
The South Africans have been participating in Africa Fashion Week London for 10 years now, because they know the value it brings to their economy. The exposure and the awareness that the designers get when they return home gives them more confidence, it allows the people in their country to want to patronize them. Because we all know that London is one of the fashion capitals of the world anyway. And if you can showcase in London, then that means you are an international designer.
One factor that has been established over the years is, basically, if you want to be seen internationally, once you are recognized in London, most of the top designers get their jump-off from London, it is London that discovers the talents and then pushes them to the world.

Africa Fashion Week has been running for 14 years now, what has the participation been like? And how have you made this brand so relevant that, 14 years later, it’s still a force to reckon with?

The first thing I would like to say is, it is by the grace of God. I have a very good team who are passionate about the brand, because it’s not something that I can do alone. It’s having people who support it, you know, who see it as their own. And then my husband has always been a firm supporter of Africa Fashion Week London and Nigeria. Even when we try to get sponsors and I don’t get sponsors, he is the one I would always go crying to, that, obviously, this year I must do Africa Fashion Week. So he’s been a very, very helpful and consistent supporter.
And in terms of the brand being relevant, like I said, there aren’t so many platforms out there that support black creatives. So, black designers, African designers, they see this as their own. You know, the audience in the UK, whenever we’re doing Africa Fashion Week, we have a turnout of close to 5,000 who come to see the best, the latest trends out of Africa. This year, Africa Fashion Week is scheduled for October 11 and 12, 2024. And it’s at the Kensington and Chelsea Conference Event Centre.

You also have a production outfit. So, how important is preserving the history of African fabrics and why is it important to preserve the history of African fashion and export it, amplify it to the world? And then in, say, 20 years’ time, if you look back, what do you want to say you’ve done?

In 20 years’ time, when I look back, I want to be considered or regarded as one of the gatekeepers of Nigerian culture via what I do, promoting our textiles and our fabrics. And it is very, very important because, I think I said it once, that it’s part of our identity. For us, our textiles, our fashion, our fabrics go beyond just a fashion statement. It is who we are. Most of you here, you’re wearing a traditional outfit. So, it is part of us, it reflects our identity. And this is the right time for the government to key into it and see it as wealth creation, poverty alleviation, a job creation project as well, which can benefit Nigeria, which can help grow our GDP and create jobs for our young graduates who come out of school with no work, no white-collar jobs on the table for them to do. Because, at the moment, what we do at the Adire Oduduwa hub is train women, and we train young people in textile making, from Adire Eleko to Adire Oniko, Adire Alabela, the different techniques of making Adire. They can generate income for themselves. We’ve trained over 1,200 at the moment, courtesy of my husband, who supports the training with funding. And, right now, we’ve graduated to another programme of taking NYSC youth corps members so that they can do their one-year youth service with us. We pay them and we train them, we give them accommodation. We pay them for training to learn in IIe Ife.

But people think that Adire is a no-go, because they believe it is an Egba thing.

They made it popular. They became the commercial hub. But it actually originated from Ife because all the Yorubas are affiliated to Ife. So it was something that originated from Ife. And during migration to Osogbo, to Ibadan, to other parts of the southwest of Nigeria, it spread across. But what Abeokuta has done that is very unique is they have commercialised it. They saw the business side of it.
Thank God for what Governor Dapo Abiodun did towards that. So, one of the things that the government does now is that, every Friday, most of the people in government, including the governor, wear Adire.
Adire is fashion tourism. Because people want to come to the country, they want to buy, they want to purchase, they want to know the stories behind it, the symbols, the significance and all of that.

Are there any other international collaborations for London or for Nigeria too?

We have a lot of international collaborations. We’re going to have a business forum at the Africa Fashion Week London, promoting the business out of fashion and textiles. We intend to have a talk at the Parliament as well, you know, just so that people can see the trade side of it, not just the fashion side. Because it’s trade that will keep the artisans going. It’s the trade that would want them to keep on producing designs. And it’s the trade that will also help us talk about things like the Asian fakes that are flooding the market and the dangers. We see cheap Adire of N3,000, N4,000, but it’s rubber, it’s dangerous to the skin. It causes cancer, but nobody educates anybody about it.

How do you differentiate between those two Adire?

By the time you touch it, it’s rubber. It’s fake. Adire majorly is cotton. You use 100% cotton. And when you touch it, you see, you know, it is cotton-based fabric. This one I’m wearing is Adire. As you can see, it’s shiny but it’s a shiny fabric that’s cotton-based.

How do you feel, having done your best in propagating the gospel of Adire and other African fabrics, and you’re seeing fakes being imported from across the world? How do you feel, stressing and getting this thing, these are local things, to global acceptance, and now people are faking it?

I think we need to keep on talking about it, keep on creating awareness. Because even the general public who buy the Adire sometimes do not know the difference between the fake and the original ones. So, it’s to keep on educating the general public, having seminars, and talking about, if you buy a fake one, what you are doing is you are building the economy of the country that made that fake one. And you are destroying the work of the artisans here in your own country who are striving so hard to create these designs. And then also the government as well, maybe policies, if you’re bringing it in and it’s fake, there must be high tariffs or something, because I know even if we say that there should be a total ban it’s not possible. But working with the government, the Customs as well, and then to train more people in Adire-making here in Nigeria. If we can also get companies to buy into it. There’s a dress-down day for most organisations on Friday. Why don’t you patronise us and buy Adire? By doing that, you’re building the economy of Nigeria. You’re creating a sustainable living for those who’ve made the fabric.
That brings me to one of the questions I’ve always asked. I went for a seminar and a guy from, I think he’s a lecturer in a university in Ekiti, he teaches chemical engineering or something like that. So, he said that one of the challenges about making textiles and Adire in Nigeria, all these types of dyes, that most of the chemicals are not made in Nigeria. That’s one of the biggest challenges. He said, how can we have chemical engineers coming out from university, they can’t even produce caustic soda? We import things as little as needles and threads. Needles and threads, we import everything. So, have we ever thought of maybe it has gotten to a stage where this is our heritage, this Adire is Nigerian, where the government should also come in and find a way we can create a company that makes caustic soda, at least, even if it’s just one of the chemicals, because he said one of the problems is that all the chemicals are not made in Nigeria and we have chemical engineers?

For me, I don’t want to solve the government’s problem. All I want to do is create a platform where young people can earn a sustainable living. If the government wants to create a company on caustic soda and there’s a way I can support, I will support. But I’m not a chemical engineer. I don’t know about chemical engineering. I don’t want to start mixing. It’s a challenge to get all those materials. It’s a challenge, but there’s an association of textile union manufacturers in Nigeria. There’s a research association of textiles in Nigeria. That should be one of their core values. I didn’t learn fashion. I’m a lawyer. I just went into fashion by a way of passion.

Are there sales points abroad for Adire?

We are talking to the government to help us establish an Adire trade centre in London. From London, it’s easy to ship out. We’ve been talking to the Nigerian Export Promotion Council for years, It hasn’t manifested yet. We’ve invited them to even be a part of the Africa Fashion Week in London to see the potential.. We were speaking to the Nigerian Ambassador. Before I left London, I had a meeting with the Ambassador. And a couple of days ago, I heard that there’s a new Ambassador.

You spoke to an Ambassador?

Yes, an acting Ambassador. He bought into it. I was hoping that he would at least be there until the end of the year. But now we have a new Ambassador. So, we have to hold that meeting again. Sometimes, that is the type of challenge that we would like the government to help us look into so that there’s continuity and we don’t have to start all over again. Because, at the end of the day, what we’re doing is creating a legacy project. My husband is funding young people to learn Adire. He doesn’t need to do it. But it’s out of his compassion for youth development. For capacity-building for the youth. That’s why he’s doing it.