Fashion
Mowalola Ogunlesi’s Yeezy Gap appointment is a pivotal moment for fashion—here’s why
The industry has been quick to poach the aesthetics of black women, but slow in giving them the power to express themselves. As the Nigerian-British designer is made design director of Kanye West’s new venture, it might be a sign that brands are finally recognising the value of black female creatives
High-profile designer collaborations are nothing new, but the 10-year deal between Gap and Kanye West’s Yeezy brand is different. Announced on 26 June via Twitter, the partnership will see Gap pay royalties and potential equity to Yeezy, giving West a workshop where he and his team can develop a co-branded line of ‘modern, elevated basics’ (that’s how the press release bills them, anyway) and deliver them to a global audience.
When West revealed the line’s design director would be Nigerian-British designer Mowalola Ogunlesi, 25, whose punk Africana designs revel in unabashed queerness and sex appeal, it was hard not to feel a pang of delight. Because whatever you think of West and his music, design sensibility or political leanings, his decision to cede creative control of what might be his most high-profile fashion venture yet to a black woman is a very big deal.
Bringing black female designers to the fore
While the industry has been quick to poach the aesthetics of black women, it has historically been much slower to give them the power and resources to own and disseminate these aesthetics themselves. The few black designers who have been tapped for major appointments or collaborations have almost exclusively been men. (Louis Vuitton men’s artistic director Virgil Abloh, one of West’s frequent collaborators, being the most high-profile example.) How refreshing to finally see a black woman, who has earned the praise of her peers and grown an international following, given the opportunity to expand her vision on the world stage.
It makes sense that we’ve hit this milestone in the current climate. Fashion’s recent (if still belated and nascent) reckoning around race aside, interest surrounding black female designers has swelled in recent years—particularly in London, where Ogunlesi and her contemporaries have engendered a new way of seeing that’s vibrant, cosmopolitan and seemingly unbothered about mainstream stamps of approval. As Ogunlesi told Vogue last year: “I’m Nigerian, so whatever I create is automatically going to be Nigerian work. I don’t feel like I have to brand myself as ‘the African designer’.”
Artistry and aesthetics, along with mutually uplifting collaboration and community-building, take precedent. And it goes beyond fashion: Ogunlesi has presented a photo series inspired by the Nigerian highlife scene with photographer Ruth Ossai in Brooklyn; produced a stylish short film starring Yves Tumor; partnered with Boiler Room on their first ready-to-wear collection; and led the costumes for Skepta’s Pure Water video. Ogunlesi’s psychedelic immersive art installation ‘Silent Madness’ in London (2019) was, she says, “about combining the things that inspire me most in the world: music, film and people… I’m creating an experience that allows the individual to come in and experience all of those things at once.”
Meanwhile, the British-Jamaican designer Grace Wales Bonner, winner of the 2016 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, curated a celebrated programme themed around black creative practices and aesthetics at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2019. And Bianca Saunders, who landed a spot on Forbes’ 2020: 30 Under 30 list of top cultural entrepreneurs, released a zine with Harlem-born photographer Joshua Woods, stylist Matt Holmes and model-writer Jess Cole on racial identity in June.
© Bennett Raglin
Initiatives such as these, along with their runway shows and collections, have invigorated London’s fashion scene and, in the process, attracted the attention of legacy brands looking for injection of new ideas and trendiness by association—along with, in some cases, a temporary veneer of inclusivity. Ogunlesi was commissioned to dress Barbie to celebrate the doll’s 60th anniversary; Wales Bonner was brought in to reinterpret Dior’s classic New Look and Bar jacket for the French house’s Cruise 2020 show in Marrakech, and collaborated with Manolo Blahnik on a collection of shoes for men; and from her Tottenham headquarters, fellow menswear phenom Martine Rose has designed capsule collections for Nike, Timbaland and Napapijri, and, under Demna Gvasalia, served as a consultant for Balenciaga.
The Kanye effect
It’s easy to be cynical about ventures such as Yeezy Gap and, indeed, many are. West, who was at one time vocal in his support for Donald Trump and just announced his own bid for the American presidency, on 4 July no less, often courts controversy. And given how Gap’s collaboration with cult African-American designer Telfar Clemens, teased with a splashy display and party in January, was unceremoniously shelved in the days following West’s announcement, it doesn’t appear that challenging norms or offering new perspectives on dress is the brand’s priority.
While the company has framed the Yeezy Gap line as a collision of a ‘visionary creative’ and an ‘iconic’ brand, and a triumphant homecoming for West, who worked in one of Gap’s Chicago locations as a teenager, Gap has struggled to remain relevant and profitable for years. In the last quarter alone, Gap has posted $932m in losses. By partnering with West, one of the most talked-about and successful creatives of any discipline working today (his own premium brand is reportedly valued at close to $3bn, and Forbes estimates his Yeezy shoe empire with Adidas has topped $1.5bn in sales), the brand is no doubt hoping to tap into the zeitgeist and the Kanye-obsessed shoppers at the heart of it. It seems the market shares their optimism: Gap stock leapt 42 per cent the day the partnership was announced.
Investing in change
Big brand collaborations have the benefit of boosting an independent designer’s profile, but this mainstream interest never seems to come to more than one-off opportunities. Rarely have we seen the sort of long-term investment that helps designers expand their own points of view and nourish the communities that are key to their success and longevity. When prestigious, high-ranking positions open up at major brands, their names often circulate among insiders but never make it to the press release.
Until now, that is. Ogunlesi’s new appointment to a plum spot at one of the world’s most recognisable brands seems to suggest that change is afoot, that all of this momentum is building to something, that the people with power (that is to say, money) are noticing the value of passing the mic to black women.
Ogunlesi’s Yeezy Gap line launches in 2021. And if Ogunlesi’s 2019 Vogue interview is anything to go by, a lot more could change between now and then. “I’m trying to be destructive,” she said. “The only way to change things is actually to just destroy it all and recreate the world from scratch. It’s the end of the old world and the beginning of a new world for the younger generation.”
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