Nigeria designer to 'bring taste, style'

The five-day fashion showcase features some of South Africa's best, alongside haute couturiers from the rest of the continent.

Sagoe is one such designer, and will show her collection on the second night.

With an eye to the turn of her designs to hit the ramp, she said over the weekend: "Nigeria, and Lagos in particular, is being celebrated internationally as a destination of taste and style of the moment in Africa.

"Nigerians are early adopters, meaning that we are at the vanguard of embracing new trends and styles from across the globe."

The inspiration for the upcoming range, she shared, has been the work of Thomas Fahm, a designer and woman's activist in the late 1960s and 1970s, who was making waves internationally.

"This collection is called the 'Komole' collection," she said.

"Komole in Yoruba means dance and bend down low (but not the "drop-it-like-its-hot" type of dance), but a deliberate swaying of the hips in an elegant fashion to the rhythm."

Sagoe - who has fans in superstar model Alek Wek, US singer and actress Anika Noni Rose, musician Nneka, top US journalist Susan Taylor, actress Lydia Hearst, Dawn French and Nigerian singer Tiwa Savage - said her designs were for kind of woman who can hold her own and "apologetic of her grandeur".

The collection was a recognition of her country's retro traditional silhouettes for the late 1960s and 1970s.

"It's very evocative of the more risqué Nigerian party wear, worn in an era when Nigeria was booming," she explained.

"At the time, women's roles were being redefined and Africa was making its presence felt globally."

Sagoe said that a lot of serendipitous occurrences in the late 1980s led to her collaboration with her mother to put revolutionary fashion ideas on the table to be lapped up by a ready crop of Nigerian men and women on the brink of an African renaissance.

The Nigerian designer is no newcomer to the fashion industry and says that she's learned a lot from her quarter century of experience.

She has shown at New York Fashion Week, Alta Roma in Rome, Alta Moda in Milan, Cape Town Fashion Week, Caribbean Fashion Week and Arise Fashion Week in South Africa.

Since her beginning as a fashion designer in Nigeria, Sagoe, who has a Masters degree in finance and management from the University of Miami and the University of Lagos, said that ideas alone without the thought of harnessing financial benefits by making designs commercial was an exercise in futility.

"No one has respect for a starving artist these days," she said.

Source: Sowetan