With her exuberant sense of top-to-toe polish—high hats, immaculate hair-styling, sharp tailoring, spike-heel Ugg boots—Tolu Coker convened an exciting show at London Fashion week. She set up her stall (an actual market stall at the end of the runway) in celebration of the women road-side hawkers of Accra, Ghana, who she’d seen on holiday recently, and those of West Africa in general. That female power, combined with her spiffy rendition of Church-going, “Sunday Best”-smart leather jackets, pleated skirts, and corseted shirt-dresses swept and enthralled along with her.
Talented young Black designers from in and around communities in London are frequently interconnected with the Caribbean—Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, Saul Nash, Bianca Saunders and Nicholas Daley, amongst others. Coker adds her own perspective as a British-Nigerian Londoner, a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and live-wire brought up in North Kensington. At home, her mom passed on stories about how she’d taken part in the street-hawking culture in Lagos. In her show-notes, Coker describes how her parents would save their “aged” clothes to send to relatives in Africa, where the garments would enter the recycling chain.
That memory lies behind her retrieval of late ’60s and ’70s styles, and how she embedded them with West African influences; such as her tailored waistcoats and trousers with volume “akin to Sokoto trousers worn by Yoruba men,” and the side-slits in her long pleated skirts, which nodded to “the breathable nature of conservative kaftans.” In more than a nod to material continuity, Coker noted that she’d also styled pieces from some of her past collections into the show. “Sustainability isn’t one-dimensional. I love to look at clothes that are in the category of ‘waste’ and breathe new life into them,” she stated. “It crosses over with the culture of hawking and recycling.” Her narrative contributes yet more to the profusion of different Black British identities which are strengthening London fashion in the 2020s—she’s telling her with equal parts cogency and joy.
