Why Spiritual Drip?

In October 2025, a large number of Nigerians active on social media (read: Twitter) were incensed by others’ participation in the Dress Like Your Miracle prompt of the Hallelujah Challenge. At the time, the Hallelujah Challenge had been running for 8 years and had previously received online criticism. However, it was different this time around. Some of the strongly worded sentiments that followed Nigerians’ participation in this expression of their desires typified it as greed. Interestingly, the desires expressed in this virtual performance of personal wants and needs were similar to prayer points regularly echoed in churches. Observing this play out on the internet, and led by a question our editorial team have been passively asking for over a year, “how do Nigerians and Ghanaians relate to faith historically and contemporarily, and how is this reflected in our fashion and style?” crystallised our decision to explore Spiritual Drip.

In this issue, we are troubling the #SundayBest conversation about African style to explore the complexity of our relationship with religion (specifically Christianity) and clothing. Religion is a big part of our lives and identities in these two West African countries, and despite the growing global influence of West African style, the specific intersection of Christianity and dress remains largely anecdotal. How does faith shape our wardrobe in and outside religious contexts? Conversely, how does our wardrobe dictate our performance of faith? Beyond trends, what overlapping ideas are present in Nigerian and Ghanaian relationships with Christianity, fashion, and being?

We’re interested in stories at the intersection of [the lack of] faith in the Christian context, clothing, fashion and identity formation in Nigeria and Ghana. We welcome submissions that fall into one of four sub-themes and are open to your interpretation of Spiritual Drip within these themes.

Church in contemporary fashion design.

How are contemporary fashion designers having conversations about Christianity, and how does this complicate our ideas of the faith? What religious themes do they play with, and what’s left unsaid in the breadth of ideas prominent in their designs? How have religious doctrines around dress informed tailoring techniques, silhouettes, garment construction and financial bets designers take? Examples of this are Meji Meji’s archival commentary on Nigerian Christianity, in which streetwear serves as a receptacle for hope and dreams, and Hertunba’s “Sunday Culture” collection, which emphasises the glamour of getting dressed for a Sunday service.

Church style and larger culture.

How do young women (and men) navigate the uncertainty of what’s appropriate to wear to Church? What historical precedents inform the use of uniforms in some Churches, and in the absence of a clearly defined uniform, how are traces of uniformity in style showing up in other Churches? How do Church merch like t-shirts, commemorative print clothing, and wristbands, for instance, act as artefacts of belonging and shared identity outside the walls of the Church? How do these labelled artefacts inform how people carry themselves in public, and subtly influence or advertise for Churches? What design considerations or philosophies are designers of these merch thinking of and drawing on to inform their process?

Church style and personhood.

What are your personal stories showing how you split your style between Church and the world? How do you navigate that tension and contradiction? How is the style of figures (e.g. pastors’ wives, pastors, church leaders) imposed, and how does that show up in people’s (read: congregation) interaction with clothes and clothing items? How are figures opposing and/or subverting traditional ideas of style in their wardrobe, using it as a gateway to drawing in a specific demography as their audience? How does the looming presence of a figure’s style in people’s dressing influence the fashion economy in the styles that are trendy and/or fabrics in circulation?

The internet is a big part of our lives today, so we are open to writing that expands our understanding of how people use the affordances of digital technologies to signal and perform their [lack of] faith. In addition to the Dress Like Your Miracle trend of the Hallelujah Challenge, examples of story directions include using Christian religious style as an aesthetic to grow an online audience, using gospel music for get-ready-with-me videos, exploring AI as a style assistant, and poking fun at religious theatre.

We welcome story formats that may not be typical of fashion writing. An example of this is a satirical guide to dressing like your miracle, which is critical of the trend and of participation in it.

The examples listed above are suggestions to inspire ideas on the direction your manuscript can take. Your manuscript is not limited to these examples. As a reminder, the central question we want to explore in Spiritual Drip is: How have Nigerians and Ghanaians related with the Christian faith both historically and in contemporary times, and how is this relationship reflected in their fashion and style? We’re interested in stories that lead with curiosity and care, and take us on a journey.

Who Can Submit?

Anyone living in Nigeria or Ghana for at least 8 months in a year. We’re interested in stories informed not only by observation and critical analysis, but also by lived experience on the continent. Personal, historical, communal, and contemporary stories that are exploratory and offer a better understanding of the Nigerian and Ghanaian experience are welcome.

As a publication that leads with research, we have a bias toward rigorous non-fiction stories (even when personal) that are original, well-reported, critical and published exclusively in the journal. We welcome submissions from journalists, storytellers, writers, individuals, archivists, independent researchers and anyone who has a story to tell at the intersection of fashion and Christianity.

We’re accepting 8 written essays and want a diversity of perspectives and story formats from long-form writing (historical or contemporary) to individual stories to community and fashion brand analysis. We’re equally interested in experimental storytelling formats and will look out for them in the submissions.

For submissions that lean heavily on historical research, the archiving(dot)fashion editorial team is open to providing additional research support where needed during the editing process.

Important: This is only a call for written stories. We will announce commissions for photo stories after the written stories have been finalised.

How to Submit?

Send your submission to info@archiving.fashion by July 1, 2026. We recommend that the subject line for your submission email be: [Pitch] [Submission Title]. For instance, your email subject can look like this: “[Pitch] The Devil Wears Kaunda”. For questions about this submission, you can write to the same email address with the subject line: “[Question] Spiritual Drip”.

We’d like to see the following information in the body of your submission email:

• Completed essay (or written submission) between 1,500 - 2,500 words in a Word Document,

• The city in Ghana or Nigeria where you live and work,

• A paragraph describing why this story matters to you, what you’re aiming for with the story and how this fits into the larger theme of Spiritual Drip. We don’t expect you to be a Christian to write, but we’d love to know why you care about the story.

Important: We’d love to read stories informed by your lived experience, and will not consider AI-generated manuscripts.

Timeline and Compensation

Each writer whose manuscript is accepted will receive between $80 and $100 in compensation, depending on the depth of their submission.

The deadline to submit your manuscript is July 1, 2026, at 11.59 PM WAT.

Meet the Team

Poster Design direction: Elizabeth Akpan, Princess Ebi, Sherifddin Apampa, Adé Abegunde

Poster Design: Sherifddin Apampa

Journal team: Elizabeth Akpan, Princess Ebi and Olachi Olua

Hi there 👋🏾. Olachi here, and we’re back with another trimester update as we step into the final stretch of the year.

If you read the last update, you’ll remember that it was more or less about finding our feet as a team. Now, it’s like we’re seeing things more clearly after refocusing and laying the groundwork for the future of our work. We’ve made progress in key research areas, reviewed our priorities for 2025 and hit a few small but satisfying milestones like reaching 1,000 followers on TikTok 🥳, and even being approached for a potential research project. It’s been reaffirming that our work really is finding its audience. Alongside these small wins, we’ve been reflecting on what it actually means to work together as a team.

Finding our Rhythm

Behind the scenes, we’ve been trying to ensure our expectations of each other are aligned. It is one thing to be very ambitious and excited about our plans, but translating that energy into everyday collaboration can be challenging. Obviously, it’s all trial and error — the nature of our work is more exploratory as opposed to following an established research framework. Now we have a working structure of how we both work, and communicating with each other about our work is way easier.

We also started applying to some funding opportunities, and while we’ve not gotten any (yet), the application questions have been useful for nailing down the much-needed clarity for some of our research projects. That’s how we were able to find clarity for what should come now and what belongs in 2026.

Depth Over Speed

In the last update, we had mentioned that we wanted to pick a research question every trimester, but that’s no longer the plan 🤷🏽‍♀️. We realised that the approach was unsustainable, so instead, we’re allowing ourselves to focus on a theme each year. This approach enables us to be as thorough and critical as we desire. This year, we fully immersed ourselves in the history of Nigerian fashion and the textile industries, and the video series on the history of the textile industry is only one of the outcomes of this research.

And while our bigger projects are still in progress, we started a new series on TikTok, titled Offscript 😅. It’s just something light to keep people engaged by spotlighting some of our interesting finds and conversations we have in the process of our research. There’s a post on our socials about a student collection from 2006 we stumbled upon from Sardauna magazine, a publication by students of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and another post inspired by an image in the archive of Aloma Mariam Mukhtar – the first woman to become the Chief Justice of Nigeria. We were curious about her appearance in 1971 and whether her style would even fly in court today.

Connecting with People

Recently, one of the joys of this trimester has been connecting with people. We’ve had people reach out to us on TikTok with resources we might not have found on our own.

Offline, that sense of connection has carried through as well. Elizabeth is in Lagos for a month on a field trip and attended archivi.ng’s August Event over the weekend. It was lovely to put faces to people who have engaged with our work on TikTok and to connect with new people who love our work. These moments remind us that the work is part of a wider community of learning and information exchange, and keep us motivated.

What’s Coming Next?

Looking ahead, we have a few things in motion:

• First things first, one of the articles we had mentioned in the last update — an essay that has since taken on a different shape, becoming very much foundational to our work in general. It should drop any day this month, so keep an eye out for it.

• We’re putting together a video series we’re pretty excited about. It will go LIVE on TikTok during the week of Lagos Fashion Week, so be on the lookout for it.

• To wrap up our research focus for the year, we’re interviewing textile designers who worked in the now-defunct textile companies in Nigeria from the ‘60s to the ‘90s. We’re looking at textile industries based in Lagos, Kaduna and Kano. If you have a lead on this or are interested in this study, please email us at info@archiving.fashion.

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It’s been over a year since I shared progress updates on archiving(dot)fashion, but things are looking up again. For starters, I now have company. I hired a research associate at the start of the year, and together, we can do research with a level of detail that lived in my fantasy for most of 2024. I am sharing this context because I’ll oscillate between describing some of our actions and plans with “I” or “we.” We are indeed a “we,” and some decisions are no longer entirely mine. So, enjoy this update no one asked for, but I’m hoping sharing our progress will become the norm in 2025!

Break Time’s Over

The break was unintended. Last year started on a good note — I started the registration process for archiving(dot)fashion as a company and got that done. I had other plans for the year, but between trying to do my best at my 9-to-5 job, constantly feeling anxious because my dad was critically ill, and coping with the pressure of being a creator online, I gave up on everything archiving(dot)fashion-related. Oddly enough, as challenging as the year was, I'm grateful that I came out of it making peace with my approach to research and storytelling.

The truth is I’m an overthinker, and I like it. I like being thorough, even if it may seem slow to others, especially when it comes to things I care about. But I’m also chronically online, and I’d be lying if I said the prominent discourse on what it means to be “authentic” and “yourself” didn’t get to me. At some point, I felt the only way to be “authentic” was to turn on my camera and share my unfiltered thoughts with the world. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that’s not me. I’m more inclined to fully immerse myself in a subject, carefully consider my thoughts, and then write a script or article to share with the world. I don’t have much to say, so I’d rather speak well about the little I know.

And when the noise was too much, I [unintentionally] did the following to keep myself sane:

• Shared my thoughts with friends who have enough context on my reality, and they reminded me to pace myself,

• Extended my work trip to Kenya and wrote a story about my time there. Doing the research for that story – having conversations with people about style, their ideas on leadership, and nationhood - brought back my spark.

• I also shared some videos on TikTok that I now consider unimpressive, but that’s the beauty of growth: you look back and are excited about how much better you're doing.

Team and New Identity

In December 2024, I was in a better mental space, so I started planning for the new year. I finally admitted that I needed help, and bootstrapping this alone wasn’t a measure of success. I realised I wasn’t alone all along; I’d worked with people whenever I shared my article with friends for feedback or reluctantly shared my struggles, asking them for help. So, why not put a structure around having company to think through things and work together?

I thought of Olachi. Earlier in the year, she volunteered to work on a foundational research project at archiving(dot)fashion, and we were figuring it out together gradually. We had lunch a few weeks before Christmas. I asked her about coming on board full-time, and she was interested. I was so excited!

I spent the holidays with my family, wrote the job description, planned for the year, and created a filing system. If I planned to bring a new person on board in the new year, I needed a structure to ease them into things. Having someone else to figure things out together and meet our goals has been lovely.

Over the last year, I’ve met people who have interacted with the work in person in Nigeria and gotten a better understanding of how people perceive this. So, it finally felt right to do a visual identity design. We have a new look, and you can also see it across other online platforms where we have a presence, including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Threads (we repurpose our Twitter posts for Threads).

Evolving Research Approach

When I started working on archiving(dot)fashion, I genuinely didn’t know what I was getting myself into. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t. The fact that I didn’t have a rigid idea of what this should be or how to go about it has opened me up to a world of learning I never would have been exposed to.

As a result, our research approach is highly contextual and very responsive to our needs and constraints. We follow our curiosities and answer the questions we deeply care about. I’ve worked on projects that still haven’t seen the light of day, because I’m not convinced I understand the subject enough. So, why write my confusion as knowledge? There is knowledge to be found in having open questions, but it’s been a struggle to define how much understanding is enough understanding. I decided to write about fashion from a historical perspective because, as a Nigerian, I don’t know enough about Nigeria to understand us. And even as the dream expands, that quest to fully immerse ourselves in the story is still dear to us. We want our stories to be grounded in context and meaningful to the people it is about. For instance, if I hadn’t spent time in Kenya speaking to people about their president’s style, the story would have looked very different, and I doubt I’d have liked its shape. Being close to a story can introduce bias, but my biggest fear is that distance also introduces an unintentional lack of care, and I just can’t live with that.

At the same time, I also knew that to tell more stories, I needed to figure out how to make the research process more efficient. The first step was bringing Olachi on board. The next decision I made, which made me less anxious this year, was having three trimesters in a year. I love having odd-numbered splits, so trimesters over quarters. Additionally, my 9-5 runs on a quarter system, so I needed to ensure the pressure isn’t getting “werser” in the same months. And the final step was to focus on building a knowledge base for a theme every trimester. For the first trimester, we looked at the rise and fall of Nigeria’s textile industry. When we looked at the stories we wanted to tell in T1, I quickly realised this knowledge was transversal. So, we decided to spend January through March knee-deep in this research. That way, any additional research we do would be very light when we write the different stories in April.

We've started sharing the first story from T1 on TikTok — it’s a 6-part video series that explores why Nigerian designers struggle with produce affordable fashion (at least for the local market) from a historical lens. It’s our first story focusing on the economy, so we learnt a lot working on it. We’ll share two more articles from our T1 research, so keep an eye out for them in your inbox.

Another motivation for working on this project is to figure out how to use emerging technologies to socialise research findings. We haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, but we’ll do a lot of that next year. I’m very interested in how people complicate technologies and how technologies, in turn, complicate people. The only reason I became a UX Researcher and, by extension, do social science research is that I took a course on Human-Computer Interaction at University and knew I wanted to do this for the foreseeable future. As a UX Researcher, I’ve mostly worked with web technologies, apps, and, more recently, AI, but I see archiving(dot)fashion as a playground for creative technological approaches to sharing stories. In fact, that’s what inspired its naming.

As a lean team, we’ve been reading about how we can incorporate AI into our process. Currently, we use it for transcribing interviews and minor edits (a paid version of Grammarly). Lately, we’ve been reading and thinking about the speculative archival work of Mayara Ferrao and Linda Dounia. We know there are a lot of ethical considerations to think of as we plan to use it in our work, but the following resources are shaping our early thinking about this:

• AI tools paint a blurry picture of our current reality – so what do these biases mean for our future?

• These Hollow Renderings

• Making Memory Machines

• Vanishing Culture (this is a big one on the fragility of digital cultural preservation, so we’re still reading it)

At some point last year, Ada reached out to interview me about my goal for this project, and I loved speaking with her. The article is up, and you can read it here.

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Revisiting Curiosities and Relationships

Last year, I applied to the inaugural archivi.ng fellowship, but I wasn’t selected. We decided to work on the project that inspired my application. It's one of our longer side quests for the year, and we’re a team of five working on it. We reached out to the archivi.ng team, and they have been super helpful with sharing access to newspapers and magazines that aren’t up on their website. We’re super excited about this project and cannot wait (but we have to wait, as we’re being realistic with the timeline) to share it with you later in the year.

Expecting a Kinder T2 and T3

T1 was super hard for me. I was adjusting to the process of going full throttle on my plans for archiving(dot)fashion and balancing them with my 9-to-5. Then, the most heartbreaking thing happened – my dad passed in February. He was critically ill, but we (my family and I) were optimistic he would make it. A week later, I celebrated the saddest birthday I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve felt a lot of things in this time — anger, sadness, pain, guilt, inability to sleep and sleeping to escape everything. I’ve cried, stopped crying, cried again and again, but weirdly enough, working on archiving(dot)fashion has been therapeutic. I had to pause working for a while because I wasn’t myself, but I returned to work at the end of March. Currently, nothing about life makes sense, and I have a lot of questions. But I’m hoping the rest of the year is kinder to me and you, reading this.

Bye Elizabeth, Hello Olachi

We plan to share two more trimester updates with you this year – one in August and the final one in December. I won’t be writing these updates, Olachi will. It will have a more structured feel, but I’m sure you’ll love learning about what we’ve been up to from her.

I’ll still write, but I’ll focus on writing fashion stories.

In the meantime, please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions or thoughts on everything we’ve shared in this update or at archiving(dot)fashion. I still haven’t figured out how to fund all the research we plan to do (so far, everything has been self-funded), so I’d appreciate any ideas.

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Notes and Thank You’s

Thank you so much for subscribing and sticking with me, with us. We don’t share every day, but we’re glad you’re here and rooting for us 🩵

Grateful to Olachi, who edited this and made sure it sounds coherent.

I wrote this article with no sound. But thanks to Chapell Roan’s Pink Pony Girl Grammy’s Performance and Griff’s Miss Me Too on a loop, I made a few final edits. Pop music is truly the soundtrack of productivity!

I’ve been in Kenya for a few days shy of a month. Between my attempts at holidaying, working remotely, and noticing how expensive it is to live here, I’ve asked a few people—from waiters to tour guides and co-workers—“Do you know the Kaunda suit? What do you think of it?” 

Chasing the kaunda story started in June. In the heat of the youth-led or dubbed by some as the Gen-Z #RejectFinanceBill2024 protests against over-taxation on essential everyday items, I DM-ed a friend on Instagram. “Please, what’s kaunda?” I asked. I’d just seen a cleverly designed poster with the catchphrase ‘the devil wears kaunda.’ She gave me a quick rundown, sharing pictures of what it looked like, and remarked on how witty the catchphrase was. 

From infographics analysing how much government ministers spend on watches to the devil wears kaunda catchphrase - a fan-fiction-like pop-culture crossover, it was hard to miss how fashion was used to rally people around the protest.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know what the story was going to be before I came here. All I wanted to do was tell the story of the kaunda and what it means to Kenyans following the protests. I had a laughter-filled conversation with two people about kaundas yesterday, and it felt right to start writing this.

Ibadan. October 6, 2024.

Move Over, Miranda Priestly; it’s Ruto!

For anyone reading who hasn’t watched the movie, it’s not about Prada—the brand. At the risk of spoiling it, I’ll share a synopsis similar to one you’ll find when you search for “The Devil Wears Prada” on Google. 

The movie introduces us to ‘the boss’ Miranda Priestly, as everyone scampers at her arrival. The camera pans to Andrea, a young woman oblivious to the fashion world, who is about to be interviewed by the scary boss. She gets the job - an assistant to Miranda Priestly, a prominent fashion magazine editor - and has high hopes it will be a stepping stone to her big-girl career in journalism. Over time, she understood the fashion industry and came to respect it as a discipline. Despite the ridiculous requests of her boss, she exceeded expectations on the job. 

In one of the movie's final scenes, Miranda tells her assistant, “Don’t be ridiculous, Andrea, everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.” Hearing Miranda Priestly say these words cured her of the naivety she had. She came into the world of fashion nonchalant, grew to admire it deeply and finally, at that moment, settled on being repulsed with the environment she found herself. 

That scene is the most striking in the movie, and it’s no surprise it resonated with so many people. It’s a meme at this point, and if there was a hall of fame for deep-fried Tiktok sounds, it belongs there. It asks the viewer, “What [questionable things] would you do to keep a job?”

While the movie immerses viewers in the exciting world of fashion, it reminds us that fashion stories are human stories. It calls us to reflect on what we’d sacrifice at the altar of our ambitions. Seeing it referenced as a rallying call during the protests, one wonders how far Ruto will go for his presidential ambitions.

Presidential Branding

“Kaunda is like milk. No matter how rich you are, it’s the same milk you will buy as the local man will buy. You don't buy milk for 200 shillings.” [sic]

A chatty stranger at the beach in Shela told me that when I asked him why he thinks the president wears kaunda. The previous day, an older man, one I’d consider an elder, described the kaunda as his Sunday best. He excitedly whipped out his phone and showed me how he’d styled it.

The kaunda suit has many iterations; however, this slim-fitted jacket and matching pants, typically made from cotton, reads as a cross between a safari and a military jacket at first glance. For Kenyans, the story is more. While young people consider it dated, it’s still the image of a sage. Before it became the president’s wardrobe staple, it was considered formal yet traditional. It transcended and still transcends class; it wasn’t cool per se, but Kenyans respected it.

Looking through William Ruto’s official Instagram page as deputy president, there is no kaunda in sight. However, it’s pretty evident he has always used his style as a tool for communication. As vice president, he wore a formal suit and tie at official events and diplomatic engagements. Sometimes, when he was out in a remote area, his style was laidback and featured modular pieces - he got rid of the tie, his pale-coloured striped shirts were not tucked in, occasionally featuring face caps or throwing on a different-coloured jacket from his trousers.

In 2022, he campaigned under the slogan “Every Hustle Matters.” The slogan has a “we will build this nation by pulling ourselves by the bootstraps” vibe. Having worked his way up from walking to school barefooted to being a member of parliament to vice president and gunning for the highest position in the country - a hustler himself, he was the perfect vessel for his mantra. He didn’t need to use local style as a crutch. The state of the economy created an ideal environment for his pitch. After all, 4 in 5 Kenyans work in the informal economy; hustling is their daily experience. 

Elections are complex, but making promises is expected. And nine months into his presidency, it is normal for anyone to start holding him accountable to his campaign promises. At this point, he could no longer claim the hustler narrative; he is the president. So, in June 2023, on a state visit to Burundi, he again fell back on clothes to communicate what his positioning couldn’t - relatability. He switched up his style and started wearing kaundas to relate with the average person - mwananchi, as someone described it to me. This was also a time he was in his “pan-African” era. On the one hand, he’s seen at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation summit arguing against African nations responding to summons by non-African institutions and the need to present a united front through the African Union while jetting across the world whenever he is summoned.

By August 2023, his style had become a point of scrutiny. In the mix of his decision-making and policies, ideas about his style were formed. People perceive the kaunda as his uniform for addressing the nation and a formal suit and tie as his international-facing outfit. In an interview on national television, his personal tailor described his new-found style as an avenue to support the local economy, promote the “African cut,” and provide more jobs.

Interestingly, in November 2023, the speaker of parliament announced the ban on kaunda suits alongside other traditional African clothes as they threatened the established parliamentary code around dressing properly. While I didn’t know what the kaunda was, if the pushback I saw on my TikTok fyp and Instagram stories is anything to go by, the ban didn’t sit well with people. Now and then, the parliament makes decisions around their code of conduct, but the passion this evoked in people reflects the perception that the ban was a move to “reserve” it for one person, making it the presidential look.

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Mapping Kaunda

“…kaundas, they don’t have flamboyant colours. They stick to natural, earth tones. You don’t see a yellow kaunda unless it is a magician or a pastor. But for a respectable person, a kaunda with a short sleeve is enough.” [sic]

That is also another reference from my conversation with the chatty stranger at the beach. He described the kaunda as having a lot of African philosophy behind it. 

At first glance, a picture of the kaunda didn’t register as traditional to my Nigerian eye. Even when Western forms of dress influence clothes Nigerians consider traditional, they start as campy adaptations and evolve into what we have today. 

The idea that Africans own African appropriation of Western forms of dressing is one I hold dear. The difference in how Nigerians and Kenyans adopt Western dressing forms challenged my understanding of what’s both traditional and African. I struggled with reconciling that it was effortless to map this traditional suit in Kenya to its Western influence. Historically, Kenyans have always had an affinity for and agency in defining their taste in imported clothing, which precedes colonisation. As Sarah Fee describes it,

“A wave of new scholarship has emphasised that in early modern times, high style in eastern Africa came via the Indian Ocean, with millions of yards of clothes imported annually from India and, to a lesser extent, Arabia, with competition from the United States and several European countries becoming appreciable from the 1830s. All of these cloth imports were shaped by African desires, demands, and coproduction.”1

The history of the kaunda in Kenya is also shaped by local desires and demand in appreciation of a president two countries away.

Named after Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s independence hero and post-independence president for 27 years, the kaunda is to East Africans what Prada is to fashion people. He was famous for wearing safari-style suits and matching pants, raising the kaunda’s profile to a respected level across East Africa.

In an episode of the Historians at the Movies podcast, Nancy MacDonell, fashion historian and writer of the Wall Street Journal column "Fashion with a Past", emphasised that the title of the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” is a masterful use of branding as Prada - the brand, commands an intellectual seriousness in fashion spaces. In her words, 

“…the label Prada is considered a very intellectual, rigorous kind of label by fashion people. It’s a real fashion person brand. Anyone could wear Chanel, anyone could wear a Versace, but it’s a fashion person who wears Prada.”

Like many independence fighters of his time, Kenneth Kaunda was an ideas man well-versed in geopolitics and a champion for independence movements across Southern Africa. To understand his public perception, I read a paper by Dr Stephen Chan, a former International Relations lecturer at the University of Zambia. While he critiques Kaunda’s policies and economic priorities in the article, he admits that,

“There is no doubt that Kaunda is a great man. With the retirements of Senghor and Nyerere, he is easily the eminent statesman of Africa. His work as a nationalist who brought independence to Zambia, and his work as a champion of independence throughout southern Africa, guarantee his place in history.”2

Post-colonial Futures

A mix of Kaunda’s charming personality, fight for independence, commitment to championing independence for other African countries, and prolonged stay in power cemented the suit as an image of respect, power, dictatorship and sometimes, revolution. At a time of post-colonial national identity formation across the continent, the ideas he embodied were considered future-forward, influencing the perception of his style. 

Zambia is a Southern African country. Looking at the map, it doesn’t share a border with Kenya. It is also 1 of 3 Southern African countries bordered by an East African country. We didn’t have the internet at the time where his [probably] flowery and evocative pan-African speeches would have made it into video edits with ambient background music. The barrier of entry to being a style influencer at the time was higher; it’s not like 2024, where creative Tiktokers would have made him cool through fan cams with K’pop music.

It’s one thing for a leader to have pan-African ideals, but it’s different for it to resonate with people [in other countries] to the point he became a style icon. For instance, Tanzania’s president declared seven days of mourning when he died, and Uganda’s opposition leader, Bobi Wine, famously wears kaunda suits. Why was he so influential? The short answer is money. 

Zambia was considerably wealthy compared to neighbouring countries. Copper prices rose from 1964 - 1970, and it was the world’s third-largest producer. The country’s economic position meant the president had enough money to fund his pan-African ideals. And when the going wasn’t smooth, he forged friendships to fund this vision. For instance, in 1973, when the Rhodesia-Zambia border was closed for his role in Rhodesia's independence struggle, he took a loan from China to build a railway connecting Zambia to Tanzania - the first of its kind across the continent.3 Post-independence era African leaders of resource-rich countries faced the hard choice of funding liberation movements in struggling neighbouring countries. Some of them, like Kenneth Kaunda, ignored the consequences to national interests and funded these movements anyway. 

The picture above piqued my interest because it is commonplace to see online claims that China’s Mao Zedong influenced Kaunda’s style and the eponymous suit. The Kenyan parliament speaker described it as “Mao Zedong’s coat” while announcing the ban on the kaunda. While the colours of their outfits are nearly identical, there are subtle differences in the construction - Mao’s has a wider fit with bigger collars, bigger buttons, and no lapel. It appears a lot more like a shirt than a suit. Drawing a direct link to Mao influencing Kaunda’s style isn’t accurate. Finding images of Kaunda’s style before his presidency and friendship with Mao would have provided additional clarity to understand his style influences. However, the photos and videos online are few and far between. I found a video where he wore the draped kente and assumed his friendship with Kwame Nkrumah most likely influenced that. Going off of this, one can argue that his style reflected the environment he was immersed in - his physical environment, working in the colonial government and the people he sparred with intellectually. Additionally, safari-style suits were already a style language recognised across East Africa due to colonisation, better explaining its influence across the region. 

Another critical factor in becoming a style influence is consistency. The difference between today’s style influencers and those from the past is that the opportunity to have your face in front of a ready audience consistently wasn’t as democratic as it is today. Kaunda’s time in government wasn’t exactly democratic. He set up a one-party system in Zambia, creating a false sense of democracy and ensuring he was in power for almost three decades. That was more than enough time to cement the look to his name. Like many African leaders figuring out what a post-colonial national identity could look like, the line between their personal dreams and national vision was thin; a leader was the nation. As a result, the soft power the nation acquired was all personified by the leader, Kaunda. 

Toppling Dominoes

Thanks to the first two years of Williams Ruto’s presidency, the suit’s lasting impression is changing—and not for good. The kaunda suit’s perception has been sustained by the actions of the people it’s been associated with—Kenneth Kaunda, church elders, and revolutionary leaders. While it nicely held contradictory ideas, the strongest impression of the suit was that of a president. So, it isn’t surprising that a president is giving it a new meaning in Kenya.

There is a lot Ruto and Kaunda’s leadership share in common—pan-African ideals, taking IMF loans, and displeasure leading to national protests. The question becomes, “Why is Ruto’s style not a national hit?” Well, he doesn’t walk the talk. Associating his time in office with a piece of clothing with such lofty ideals was always going to be a hit or miss. He missed the first cardinal rule of being a style icon - at least [pretend to] live out the ideals you project. 

Well-intentioned or not, being a style influence is tough. It takes a lot to pull off a solid personal style and become a “national it-boy.” As a friend described it, “kaunda suit will be worn by local area chiefs, the clothes leaders will wear during the national holidays or [school] principals of an older generation. It’s typically associated with an older generation." [sic]

For the younger generation at the forefront of the protest, Gen Z, the affection for the kaunda is a distant memory in their psyche, and rightly so. This demographic has come of age six decades post-independence, and Ruto’s attempt at reviving it as a fashion statement is probably their most frequent interaction with it. His wardrobe, specifically the kaunda suit, is a capsule of the ill memories they associate with his government. 

Like Andrea’s final disappointment in Miranda Priestly’s betrayal of their colleague, Kenyans withdrew all the good graces associated with the suit from Ruto during the protests. Interestingly, this growing disdain trends along the lines of power devolution in the nation. From my conversations with people, it is most vigorous in Nairobi, where the protests started.

Notes and Thank-yous!

I am thankful that I have friends who took the time to read this story in the middle of “adulting.” Chisom, MaryAnn, Melissah, Nicole and Neema’s feedback brought it alive.

I’m deeply grateful that people in Kenya answered my questions about the kaunda and their style. This story wouldn’t have been as expansive without their carefully considered opinions.

My productivity is usually powered by playing a song on repeat until I get tired of it. So here are the songs that were my companions at different points in the process of writing this story - “Hausapiano” by Kvng Vinci, Aqyila’s “Bloom” ft Strings From Paris, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Taste,” Chris Olsen and Sri’s cover of “Young and Beautiful,” onoola-sama’s “storyman*,” and Rema’s “March Am.” Honourable mention are the voices at Lamu House restaurant - the background noise that stayed with me as I wrote the first section of this article.

“Nigeria to the World”

But, what happens when different aspects of Nigerian identity are produced and heavily marketed online? I’ll admit, seeing the increasing global success of Afrobeats artists and Nigerian creatives online feels really good. However, the distinction between online commentary on individual fashion choices and curated celebrity images has become increasingly ambiguous. An example of this ambiguity was when a Twitter (now X) user captioned a video of a bride and her aso-ebi ladies downloaded from Tiktok, “Why did they eat up the bride like this???😭😭😭😭”

Out-of-context and ungraceful online interactions with the bride’s dress made from aso-oke - a fabric with strong local ties and historical significance forced people to share their reservations about our current wedding fashion. There were so many conversations happening at once between Nigerians and non-Nigerians alike. Why should the dress need an explanation? Who is qualified to speak on Nigerian culture and fashion? Why are designs taking inspiration from the West considered aesthetically superior to those steeped in the local context?

“#RejectModernityEmbraceTradition”

Nigerians home and abroad agreed on one thing - #RejectModernityEmbraceTradition. Out with the new - corsets, sequins and thigh-high slits. In with the old - iro and buba with gele. The shared longing for the old look may come across as mindless nostalgia however, it’s an indication that something is missing in current bridal fashion. 

I won’t pretend I have the answer, but a closer look at our history may offer some perspective. Let’s go back to the mid to late 1800s when the first sewing machines landed in West Africa. Initially stationed in colonial fortresses and primarily used to produce clothes for the transatlantic slave trade, these machines - expensive for the time, were eventually democratised, becoming possessions of African elites. To paint a picture of how important they were considered at the time, Catherine E McKinley prefaces in her book - The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women:

“For African women across the continent, many of the most powerful but less remarked upon modern legacies were born of the sewing machine and the camera.” 1

As more West Africans had access to the sewing machine at the turn of the 20th century, a sartorial language transcending ethnic notions of dress emerged. Featured on bride price lists, the sewing machine became a tool for economic freedom. Women who couldn’t sew rented it out to seamstresses. 

I imagine that access to the sewing machine - as with most technologies, didn’t automatically confer the skills to operate it. So, drapery becoming a staple in the local fashions of the century was an innovative response to the constraint of fewer seamstresses fielding requests for the growing taste in machine-sewn clothes. From the Igbo double wrapper to the Ibibio/Efik Usobo and the Yoruba iro, draped clothing weaved its way through Nigeria’s cultures.

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Victorian-era dress took on a new life in the hands of these seamstresses. As Catherine McKinley describes it, “...it comes in a very wide, usually shapeless dress with smocking or lace ruffles.” They were fluid, straight cuts in a dance with the wind and true to form on all bodies.  

These dresses and wrappers invite the wearer to participate in the design of the dress - a constant reminder that dress-making doesn’t end when hemming and stitching are done. The movement and fluidity in a lot of the styles of the time showed up in Nigerian wedding dresses lasting into the first decade of the 21st century.

“I want to be Snatched”

The movement and fluidity in our dress sense gave way to a world where in the words of Bobrisky, "everyone wants to be snatched.” It all started with one woman and brand - Deola Sagoe. While the corset doesn’t feature prominently in the brand’s collection, her experimentation with lace-patterned aso-oke, slimmer cuts and, Western-inspired silhouettes defined the current look for Nigerian brides. Her quest to find a global audience and inject cash into the local economy in the first half of the 2010s reinvented the look of the Nigerian bridal dress and made it fashion with a capital “F.”2 At a time when Nigerian weddings were gradually becoming a global spectacle, especially with the rise of blogs like Bella Naija, Deola Sagoe’s over 20 years of experience perfectly positioned her to sense the zeitgeist of the time and pivot to designing Nigerian bridal dress.

The brand started the first collection for Nigerian bridal dresses, however, more designers have hopped on that train. Once celebrities in the US started wearing different iterations of corsets and corset-inspired clothing showed up in some designers' fall/winter collections in 2019, Nigerian bridal designers went all in on corsets. Style by Ruvero, Veekee James, and Tubo Bereni, are some of the designers that have made the corsetted look their brand’s signature.

“Are Corsets the Answer?”

At the core of traditional bridal fashion were 2 things - movement and sustainability. Traditional bridal fashion featured a lot of drapery, offering women the chance to participate in moulding the dress to their bodies, and it was sustainably designed for the lives of these women. The iro, for instance, lives many lives - cover cloth, wrapper, headwrap, the list is endless. On the other hand, the heavily corsetted bridal dresses are one-dimensional. Beyond the flat image online, these dresses offer no world of possibilities after the wedding.

Apart from the lack of sustainability, this tired use of corsets in bridal dresses is symptomatic of a growing skill gap in dress construction in our fashion industry. The top corset-related queries on Google Trends are all about DIY-ing them with local fabrics.3 Social media usage is to Nigerian fashion today what the sewing machine was to our fashion sensibilities in the 1800s. While the women in the 1800s contextualised the construction of Victorian-era dresses, the bridal designers today slap corsets on local fabric without any innovation in construction. 

One could argue that these designers are merely following the trend in search of profitability. That’s fair, fashion is a business. However, fashion houses like Ejiro Amos Tafiri4 and Dye Lab5 are proof that there is a market for dresses that move.

Considering Deola Sagoe’s five-year run to find a market for lace-patterned aso-oke, fabric manipulation has also become core to our traditional bridal fashion. It doesn’t have to be iro and buba, double wrapper and lace blouse, or Onyoyo, but we need contextually-relevant dresses. Let’s see dresses that bounce and take up space, fabric manipulation, clothes designed for women’s bodies and the context of these wedding ceremonies. The last time Nigerians negotiated identity online with Deola Sagoe’s bridal collection in 2018, innovation in bridal dress design took a nose-dive. This time around, I hope Nigerian bridal designers are listening and taking notes - corsets aren’t the answer.

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Notes and Gratitude

This article is the first of a 2-part series on Nigerian wedding fashion. In August 2023, I shared a video essay with my findings researching the evolution of Nigerian wedding fashion in the 2010s. Since I published that video essay and,  inspired partly by events on social media, I have had time to think about the research, expanding on the ideas in the video. This first part tries to answer the question of innovation in the design of Nigerian bridal dresses, and the second part will be a deeper dive into digital technologies (more specifically, social media) and their affordances in shaping the evolution of Nigerian bridal fashion witnessed in the 2010s. Thank you for reading!

Grateful to Lese, Funmi and Chisom who took the time to edit this article - their feedback brought it to life.

My earliest documented memory of this project is a comment I left under this YouTube video over two years ago.

Reading the last sentence out-loud is hilarious because I only made progress and spoke to the group of young Nigerians I described in the comment in 2023.

So, what changed?

Well, I travelled. I travelled to Dakar for my birthday this year and that experience fuelled me with the needed inspiration to kickstart this project. It was my first experience travelling solely for pleasure, rather than for work or study. The details of my trip that led to my commitment to this project can wait for an in-person conversation.

And then?

I returned to Lagos after my 9-day holiday/birthday celebration. My contract at work ended in the same month, and I moved to Abuja. For the next 3 months, I had no job. So, I spent time thinking, ideating, researching and planning my prototype - a video essay on the evolution of Nigerian wedding fashion in the 2010s.

I talked to everyone I met about my plans and learned the importance of sharing. The more I spoke to people, the clearer my thinking became.

Initially, I had this grand idea of sharing my project on Instagram and TikTok. But after hitting a brick wall while researching for my first video, I started to rethink my strategy. I realized that Instagram alone wasn't the best fit – a bit of a change from my comment on Khensani's video two years ago. The reason? Instagram's search feature is pretty much non-existent. And for me, the whole point of archival work is to inspire further research. People should be able to easily find and use the information they need. If my findings are buried in a platform without a decent search function, then what's the point?

The first video essay 🥳

About three months ago, I took the plunge and published my prototype – a 30+ minute video essay. That single step was the moment I felt like archiving.fashion truly came to life. I was also super excited to receive a lot of feedback on the video. It was amazing to see people (mostly my friends 😂) engaging with my work and contributing to the direction of archiving.fashion. As exciting as that felt, it also meant I had my work cut out for me. To address some of the feedback, I did the following:

• Sound - I got a rode mic,

• Video length - I am making shorter videos in future,

• Visual - I hired an illustrator to design the thumbnail,

• Obvious script reading - I have been practising speaking to my camera,

• Research depth - I’ve been meeting with other people doing archiving work in Nigeria to build relationships for information exchange, and

• Better transitions - I’ll spend an hour on Friday brainstorming with the video editor.

But what changed about archiving.fashion’s vision?

Not a whole lot. Three months ago, my heart was set on telling Nigerian fashion stories with the depth and care they deserve through video essays. While that's still my core mission, I've realized that my research output won't always be limited to video essays. So, what's the current vision?

1. Fashion archiving: Culture and history of garments - textiles, form, and construction. 

2. Digital curation: Digital experiments to critique the past and imagine new futures for fashion storytelling.

While my research for the next two years is focused on Nigeria, my vision extends far beyond Nigeria's borders.

Over the next year, my priority is to improve the quality of production and explore more effective ways to share my findings. Someone asked me if there's an audience for this in Nigeria, and I firmly believe there's always an audience for knowledge. Besides, I'm not solely thinking of Nigerians as the consumers of this knowledge. To me, Nigerian history, whether it's fashion-related or not, is an integral part of global history – it's simply a matter of perspective. My research calendar for next year is packed with four exciting projects, and ambitious plans to share my findings with the world.

Why am I doing this? 🤔

I love asking questions - figuring out why things are and questioning why they aren’t different. It gives me so much joy! I’m lucky I get to do that for a living - I am a UX researcher with a research and design agency. But archiving.fashion is my passion project, where my quest for answers comes to life in a realm that's new to me – the world of fashion. While I wear clothes and try to keep up with fashion news, analysing fashion stories and images is an entirely different endeavour. That to me, is the fun of it all - the newness.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in keeping up with, subscribe on YouTube and follow on Instagram. If you’d like to collaborate with me on this, please send me an email at ibethakpan@gmail.com.