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!

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.