Foday Dumbuya & Zezi Ifore
“We met at a Tate Late around seven years ago through our mutual friend Monique,” says Foday Dumbuya, creative director and founder of British African heritage menswear brand Labrum, of his first encounter with Zezi Ifore, artist, broadcaster and creative consultant. Monique told them: “‘You two are fab, and you two are going to be fab together.’” (She meant this, they add, platonically.) “I thought he was cool,” says Ifore, “but it wasn’t until I went to a performance at the House of St Barnabas, and the person in front of me took off their jacket, a green bomber made by Labrum… That’s when I was like, I’m awake. You could see from the seams on the inside how well it was made.” “Fods” – as she and all Dumbuya’s close friends call him – is “the real deal”.
Labrum, which was recently honoured with a Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. It began while Dumbuya was working as a bespoke design specialist for Nike in London. “I would collect all the deadstock fabric,” he says, recalling a leftover fly-knit material he used to create patch pockets on his shirts. “I’m obsessed with having different pockets because I’m always carrying around multiple notebooks with me,” he jokes.
He launched the brand because he felt something was missing in how African fashion was being represented. His parents are from Sierra Leone, and there was a desire to champion the country’s music, food and culture. But at the same time, he says, “it was important I didn’t forget where I grew up. London is the place where I became a man.” Labrum looks to celebrate this duality, offering the best of British tailoring with west African flair.
It’s one of the reasons the brand speaks to Ifore, who has worked as a magazine editor and consulted for Prada Mode, the Venice Biennale and Tate. It helps her to embrace both coming from a Nigerian tribe called Isoko and her English identity (she grew up in Vauxhall). Another is her appreciation of craftsmanship. Her mother, a talented seamstress who designed and imported traditional Nigerian textiles, ran a shop out of her living room. “She made a lot of my things. And when your mum’s making something, she’s making it with love.”
Dumbuya often refers to Labrum as a “label of love” – not only for the care that goes into the development of each product but also for the way he prefers to work mostly with close friends. Among his core support are Yinka Ilori and the artist Julianknxx: Ifore refers to the trio as “Destiny’s Child” – but for her “every single one of them is Beyoncé”. One of her favourite memories is when “Foday took me to the Vietnamese that he, Yinka and Julian always go to for this special fish […] That’s when I felt like I was really part of the fold,” she says. “She’s been part of the journey ever since,” adds Dumbuya.
Both sing the praises of London as a “melting pot” of different cultures and inspirations, whether it’s on the street, at the Tate or in an Uber; “I’ve had five sensational Uber rides this week,” Ifore says. “Today, Balvinder was telling me how to make masala.” “There’s a freedom to experiment and be yourself,” says Dumbuya, “and that brings joy – as should the people you surround yourself with.” He nods to Ifore, smiling. She smiles back. Inès Cross
Rukky Ladoja & Ré Olunuga
Rukky Ladoja met her friend, composer Ré Olunuga, more than 20 years ago in London. “We’ve been bouncing ideas off one another ever since,” says Ladoja, founder of Lagos-based brand Dye Lab.
“I remember the first time I saw Rukky’s work – or, should I say, the unique way she looks at things – was when she started repurposing T-shirts,” says Olunuga, as the two convene in O’DA art gallery in Lagos. “To this day, she’s always trying to work with things around her.”
Dye Lab is a small-batch craft brand exploring indigenous dyeing techniques. Its products – which span kaftans to homewares – are testament to “what is available, what is great, what is familiar and what the people working in Lagos know how to do well”, says Ladoja, who moved back to Lagos from London in 2008. A year later she co-founded fashion brand Grey (since her departure, it has become a creative production agency). Her decision to create Dye Lab came, in part, from a series of conversations with Olunuga, who splits his time between London, Lagos (where he has spent the past decade building the city’s first philharmonic orchestra) and Los Angeles, where he has recently been working on a set of film scores for Disney+. His style and mindset were the perfect sounding board, says Ladoja.
It’s why she brought him along to a first, experimental meeting with her dyers. From batik to tie-dye, “he was there to help me understand what is fully possible when it comes to hand-dyeing in Nigeria, and see how intricate one can go”. Both laugh at the irony of Olunuga – who is known for not wearing any colour – championing a brand in which colour is the crux. “But it helps to specify that what I want to talk about with my designs goes beyond just aesthetics,” says Ladoja. “It’s the doctrine, the ideology behind what it all means.”
The two of them grew up in Lagos, and can feel its influence. “Lagos is still very young,” says Olunuga. “One lens through which to look at it is that there are a lot of issues; another is that it is still being built. For me, growing up in Lagos meant that I was surrounded by raw potential everywhere.”
“There’s so many avenues for possibility here,” adds Ladoja – especially when it comes to collaboration. “If you look at anything I do at Dye Lab, there’s evidence of many hands. Everything has been done by reaching out and saying, ‘Let’s do this together.’” The same goes for O’DA, which belongs to her friend and former partner at Grey, Obida Obioha. (“Anything to do with us creating any interior spaces” – including the Dye Lab showroom – “we know who to call first.”) And also to Olunuga’s work: to create orchestral music, or music of a certain scale, you need other people to bring it to life. “It’s about learning how to give your ideas and concepts over to somebody else […] to make it a conversation,” he says.
“It would be impossible not to be a dreamer when you are from Lagos,” concludes Ladoja. “We are in a space where a lot of the things we are creating, there’s no template for, or they don’t exist.” IC
Tolu Coker and Olapeju Coker
For a young designer stepping into the fashion industry, sustainability has become an unavoidable consideration. But for Tolu Coker, who launched her namesake label in 2021 after graduating from Central Saint Martins and working at fashion houses including Celine, it’s an inherent choice. She credits this, in large part, to her mother, Olapeju. “She’s probably the most resourceful person I know,” says Tolu, 30. “She doesn’t like to throw anything away. We have stuff lying around the house that’s older than me. It’s both a blessing and a curse…”
As a child, Tolu, who grew up in north-west London with her Nigerian family, would spend her weekends rummaging for trinkets at St Augustine’s car-boot sale in Kilburn where her parents liked to thrift and trade. “Most of our clothes were from charity shops and car-boot sales, or things that my mum would make,” says Tolu, who recalls being dressed in hand-sewn pinafores. She also remembers her mother making her father return an outfit Tolu had persuaded him to buy her from the high street for her school disco. “It was an off-the-shoulder top. I still think about it. Do you remember this?” asks Tolu. “I said to you, I’m not going to give you things that I can’t afford that are not investing in your future,” Olapeju explains.
It’s a philosophy that has shaped Tolu Coker’s designs, which are made from deadstock fabrics and upcycled materials, and manufactured locally. Sophie Hallette, who supplies lace for fashion houses such as Chanel, Gucci and Erdem, is an ongoing sponsor, sending her old bits of lace that Tolu then reworks. “Growing up on a council estate where money wasn’t a free-flowing resource, we had to look at different things as currency,” says Tolu. “You know – what do I have that I can work with? That’s always the thing I lean on in problem solving.”
Drawing on her Yoruba heritage and the African diaspora is the cornerstone of her brand. Her AW24 collection, Broken English, was inspired by the stories of west Africa’s street-hawking culture that Olapeju had regaled her with, having worked as a street vendor in Lagos before moving to the UK to study.
“In Yoruba culture, so many things are preserved in our fabrics,” explains Tolu. “We have funeral fabrics to commemorate those who have transcended, while others will denote what class you’re from, so the emotive connections are really important.” It’s one of the reasons denim is a democratic staple across her collections. “It’s probably the material I feel most comfortable in.”
Community is stitched in in more ways than one, with her mum and neighbours regularly chipping in to help. “At this point, they don’t even ask questions,” says Tolu. “Our street becomes this production chain. My mum will drop stuff off to the neighbours, they’ll come and drop it back over, and she gives them food and then the next bolt of lace.”
The Coker clan is tight-knit: her brother, Ade, who has taken today’s photographs, shoots the campaign imagery and, she confesses, her mum likes to “steer the ship” a little bit sometimes. “I’ll be asking her to step in to assist and she comes in as my mum-slash-creative director,” laughs Tolu. “I do value her opinion – just not when it’s the day before the show and nothing can be changed.”
“The fact that I have knowledge of garment construction can also be a weakness,” admits Olapeju. However, they never clash on the overall vision. “She’s pushing the boundaries all the time,” says Olapeju proudly. “She’s making a statement, from her use of colour to her storytelling. I’m just blown away.”
Tolu is keen to work with artisans across the diaspora, and use Tolu Coker as a vehicle for social change. “There’s always been this quite monolithic story when it comes to Black Britishness,” she says. “I want to be able to retell the narratives… Tell those stories with more dignity.” Sara Semic