Mowalola

Mowalola was founded in 2017 in London by Nigerian-British designer Mowalola Ogunlesi after her Central Saint Martins MA graduation. The brand has been one of the defining post-2017 London-anchored 'Nigerian-and-African-cultural-luxury-fashion' brands, with the deliberately-saturated-graphic visual culture and the brand's deliberately-political-and-cultural-commentary aesthetic anchoring the broader brand cultural position. The Mowalola vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-body-conscious leather-and-mesh ready-to-wear with deliberately-Nigerian-cultural-reference graphic-design motifs, hand-printed silk and cotton shirts with deliberately-political-commentary references to broader Nigerian-and-African contemporary culture, the brand's iconic Mowalola motorcycle leather-suit programme, deliberately-architectural cotton-and-linen ready-to-wear, and a colour palette anchored to washed-black, oxblood, ecru, plus the brand's recurring use of saturated red, electric-blue, marigold-yellow, and the iconic Nigerian-and-African-cultural-aesthetic colour combinations. The brand has presented at London Men's Fashion Week each season since 2018 and Ogunlesi briefly served as Yeezy creative director under Kanye West in 2020-2021. The brand is independent and held by Ogunlesi. Mowalola operates with no permanent retail of its own, distributing through SSENSE, MATCHES, Dover Street Market, GR8, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, and a curated set of contemporary-luxury-streetwear specialty retailers globally. The brand has been one of the more culturally specific post-2017 Nigerian-British London-anchored 'cross-cultural-luxury-fashion' brands.