How many people can say that their wardrobes are fully a reflection of themselves? Karolina Ashion, for one. The Kiev-based newscaster and television host meets me at the Ukrainian National Home building with a heaping stack of traditional wax fabrics from Lagos in her arms. The kaleidoscope of canary yellows, emerald greens, ruby reds, and royal blues take form in pieces like a pleated tunic with thick straps knotted at the shoulders, a long skirt with regal tiers, and a suit with flared pants. This blisteringly high-contrast palette has no intention of blending in—especially in Ukraine, a nation known for its frigid winters, towering gray Brutalist structures, and tendency toward earth tones everywhere else. But these sharply tailored looks are more than fitting for Ashion, who as the moderator of two news programs on Ukraine’s 2+2 network—Do Business and Secret Material, which focus on such topics as new business leaders and government corruption—is more than used to drawing attention.
Ashion was born in the Soviet Union to a Ukrainian mother and Nigerian father who met at university in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was raised primarily by her mother in the small factory and military city of Shostka, Ukraine; her father returned to Nigeria when she was 5 years old. As a child, and later as a teenager, Ashion’s skin color (a rarity in both her largely homogenous town and the radically un-diverse Soviet Union beyond it) made her the subject of a lot of unwanted attention. “Was it hard for me to grow up as the only one with my skin color, especially in a tiny city?” asks Ashion. “I answer you like this: I had reasons to close myself off, to be angry at the whole world and turn my back on everything. But the color of my skin was actually a strong incentive for me to push forward.” Ashion excelled in school, eventually receiving a scholarship to university.
And then there was Nigeria, which seemed about as different a place from where she was as she could imagine. Ashion maintained an interest in her roots throughout her childhood, and often exchanged letters and photographs as a way of staying in touch with her father. “When I was around 10 years old, I received a large envelope from my father with photographs of my brother’s birthday. The kids were so brightly and beautifully dressed and standing around this huge cake. I swear I had never seen something like it. There were adults in traditional clothes. They looked so happy!” she says. “I began to believe in a fairy tale, that one wonderful day I would get to see this world of happy and brightly dressed people.”
After the Soviet Union fell, Ashion got her chance. She visited her father in Nigeria for the first time in 1999, and later again in 2015, to attend her half brother’s wedding. It was during that later trip that she explored the idea of wearing traditional Nigerian fabrics back in Ukraine. “Before I came back to Kiev, I asked my friend, the stylist Yuri Juykov, to think of different ways we could make the fabrics into dresses and pantsuits,” says Ashion. “The result was several bright looks—they aren’t traditional Nigerian costumes.” But then, she isn’t a “traditional” Nigerian. Rather, these clothes, what she calls “classic Nigerian prints in a European silhouette,” are as close as clothes can come to representing the true mix of who she is. They are currently deemed “too bright” for her to wear on air, but she hopes to eventually be able to produce her own clothing line, so that other people can also slip into something a little bit beyond their comfort zone.