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Ana is wearing a corset, dress, scarf and tie in satin and gloves in velvet by TOLU COKER. Hat in upcycled leather by TOLU COKER X VIRNA PASQUINELLIPhotography by Ben Toms, Fashion Direction by Katie Shillingford

From West Africa to London: The Cross-Cultural Clothing of Tolu Coker

Inspired by the designer’s British-Nigerian heritage and a recent trip to Ghana, Tolu Coker’s latest collection immersed its audience in a glorious sensory celebration of a West African street market

Lead ImageAna is wearing a corset, dress, scarf and tie in satin and gloves in velvet by TOLU COKER. Hat in upcycled leather by TOLU COKER X VIRNA PASQUINELLIPhotography by Ben Toms, Fashion Direction by Katie Shillingford

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:

What is true of language, the heart and the mind is this: to tell the most up-to-date, urgent truths, they must constantly evolve. What is true of art (the science of creation) is that it must remind us of what we know … or make us aware of what we don’t – we should be interrupted.

Art is a bridge into portals of memory and/or new awareness. That’s how it felt to witness Tolu Coker’s Autumn/Winter 2024 show. Inspired by the designer’s British-Nigerian heritage and a recent trip to Ghana, it immersed its audience in a glorious sensory celebration of a West African street market. Models wore Prince of Wales check and stripes – nods to traditional western tailoring with a modern edge – and vivid print clashes, set against a backdrop of street signage, arrangements of West African goods and produce, including kente cloth, peppers, plantains, fufu (a rogue potato), and Afrobeat blaring, all spliced with the sound of the traffic, conceived and recorded by Coker herself. The show was an all-encompassing mosaic of intentional chaos and all the brightly coloured things you knew if you knew, and if you didn’t – well, there it was, transported to London.

Like Coker, I was raised in England – a fellow child of the diaspora. Mine was a Jamaican household where patois was frowned upon in favour of shiny, proper English. It worked – I’m now an author, but the patois and pidgin slipped through on the undersides in my grandmother’s tongue, strengthening everything – giving words an interesting doubleness, adding dimension and dexterity. And so, the collection’s title, Broken English, was powerful, presented as a “linguistic convening of othered communities, separated by borders”.

How I loved that expression, that positioning of the meld of language known by many as “broken” – as evolved, as essential. The show dazzled in its specificity. Coker views clothes as more than a commodity; they are conversations, identity markers that speak for themselves, preserving and proclaiming culture. One gets the sense of her as a researcher and cross-cultural commentator. When we sit down to talk, I’m intrigued (though perhaps not entirely surprised) that Coker considers clothing just one of her many outlets of expression. Fashion is never the beginning of her reference point for apparel; she is a self-professed “clothing historian” who creates clothing as a response to document our moment in time.

What does it mean to amplify a story, its dignity intact? “Clothing is the embodiment of a larger narrative,” she says. “My parents are Yoruba and most of our histories are oral. I think a lot of people across the diaspora can relate to that. We haven’t archived things in the way of museums or institutions, but our histories exist.”

There’s also the real – dare I say purest? – use of what we understand as sustainability. Simply put, Coker’s clothes are built to last, using upcycled and recycled fabric. Having grown up working class, as someone now sitting in the luxury space, she set as her bottom line that the work had to be about more than creating exclusive items at a high price point.

“My parents were great thrifters of quality wear,” she says. “We shopped at car boot and jumble sales, and my mum made a lot of things from hand-me-downs. I think of longevity, fit and wear – when people buy something, it should be of a certain quality so that they can hand it down, and it stands the test of time as far as construction and craft are concerned. It is always about a moment in time, a memory, a feeling, a connection to something.”

“Fashion can be a powerful tool for social change. It’s probably one of the best places to have serious conversations, and all collections begin with conversations” – Tolu Coker

Today, her values align with precisely that. Wearing as storytelling. Preserving and reinventing garments and materials as preserving and reinventing oneself. Coker was brought up in London and has her own clear-sighted views on sustainability. “In Britain, we have a monopoly on that conversation, but I don’t think the west has necessarily pushed the boat forward. If you want experts or consultants on sustainability, look to children and parents of the diaspora – for us, it is inherent, interwoven into the culture as opposed to a USP used to market.” 

Her words immediately bring to mind the ‘immigrant joke’, but Coker beats me to it: “Ask any kid across the diaspora. They all know the inside joke – you’ve opened a tub of what you think is ice cream – but what’s inside it?”

I am transported to being nine years old and the well-remembered disappointment of discovering frozen rice in a Carte D’Or carton in Grandma’s freezer – or worse still, vegetable soup. But yes, this was reuse at its most fundamental – finding value in what is easily discarded – a new use for an older thing.

“In some ways, Broken English is, too, a double entendre – the necessary brokenness of this idea of western superiority and hegemony, this idea of Englishness being the standard. This, too, is a celebration of the pidgin used among market traders and hawkers,” Coker tells me.

Broken English is indeed a tribute to the hawker – their sense of utility, function and entrepreneurial resourcefulness all stemming from the urge of necessity.

Last November, in a bustling market in Ghana, Coker noticed that many items being hawked were international produce. And what appeared at first glance as a vast, unusual landscape, was in fact lines and lines of textile waste piled up in the distance. Indeed, the regions first affected by the impacts of excessive consumption are situated in the global south. The irony is stark: not only are the hawkers lining the pockets of western third-party sellers to live – and below the poverty line – but they are also affected environmentally. This is a truth to amplify. “Fashion can be a powerful tool for social change,” Coker says. “It’s probably one of the best places to have serious conversations, and all collections begin with conversations. I could never do this alone. There’s an entire community behind it,” she says. In research preparation for the show, Coker spoke at length to family and friends, stories layered on stories. The result, a collection that starts a conversation.

The show opened with a monologue; a Nigerian woman’s rich, energetic voice resounded, declaring the market open. On each model, examples of the breaking of tradition and deconstruction inspired by the hawkers, whose aesthetic informed the very proportions of the show: panel inserts, deliberate clashing of colour and fabrics. The show’s emblematic play on tradition in the head-to-toe dressing, sharp, exaggerated silhouettes and layering were a perfectly pitched, highly seasoned reverse gaze from West Africa to London.

Hair: Mari Ohashi at LGA Management. Make-up: Niamh Quinn at LGA Management. Manicure: Saffron Goddard using Le Vernis in Rêveuse and La Crème Main by CHANEL. Casting: Mollie Dendle at Streeters. Models: Ana Elisa Brito at Select Model Management and Lorenzo Ball at Milk Model Management. Digital tech: Cameron Williamson. Lighting: Sam Lort and Ed Phillips. Styling assistant: Precious Greham. Hair assistant: El-Frida IbrahimDikko. Make-up assistant: Manabu Nobuoka. Set-design assistant: Phoebe McElhatton. Printing: Artful Dodgers Imaging. Production: We Folk. Producer: Amy Gallagher. Postproduction: The Hand of God. Special thanks to Amy Gwatkin

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.