Lagos Fashion Week begins its “Woven Threads II: Moving Circles” today. The virtual activations will explore distinct textile craftsmanship and its use of embroidery, weaving, spinning, and customization.
Lagos Fashion Week and Style House Files will present Iamisigo, Awa Meité, Nkwo, Emmy Kasbit, Pepper Row, Bloke among others at Woven Threads. These designers’ works highlight the link between the future of fashion and the preservation of textile craftsmanship across the continent as a foundation for cultural and socio-economic sustainability.
Lagos Space Programme which prides itself on sartorial projects exploring multidisciplinary collaborative futures shared a fashion film that explores clothing as a combination of physical matter, non-physical matter and aesthetics to form resplendent pieces that reflect the character of its wearers.
“Aṣọ (Dress) can be conceived as a visual form of oríkì, as the arrangement of patterns, colours, shapes, and textures on a figure can cohere into a powerful gestalt form–a ‘look’ –that is able to trigger an effective response in the perceiver. The Yoruba terms, ojú-inú (inner eye) and oju-ọnà (design consciousness) respectively refer to the intuitive and technical capacities required by an artist to engineer a visual or verbal oríkì that speaks to the subject’s ìwà, and in doing so releases àṣẹ.
Ẹwà, meaning beauty, is the result of a work of art that realizes the art object’s essential nature, its inner character, its ìwà. Accordingly, aesthetic beauty cannot exist separately from a deeper ethical truth–a position that refutes dominant Eurocentric framings of aesthetics.
The Lagos Space Programme conceives of clothing as oríkì, combining physical matter (colour and sound), non-physical matter (àṣẹ), and aesthetics (poeticism, rhythm, and proportion) to form resplendent pieces that reflect the ìwà of its wearers”.
Text by Kojo Abudu, Five Theses on Lagos Space Programme
Credits:
Director: @kingandjohnson
Executive Producer, Creative Director, Stylist: Adeju Thompson
Model: @michael.samuel_, @90smodelmgmt