Inside Afrobeat Star Tiwa Savage’s Very First New York Fashion Week

Tiwa Savage is running late, having just tumbled out of the Maki Oh show and entered a dimly lit bar a few blocks away in Union Square. “I’ve been up since about 5 a.m.,” the Lagos-based Afrobeat star says. “I’m jet-lagged. Everything seems like a blur.” This makes sense, when you consider all that Savage has seen and done this past week, from attending such shows as LaQuan Smith and Pyer Moss to performing at basketball player Carmelo Anthony’s second collaborative collection, Melo Made.

As for the Maki Oh presentation, Savage wouldn’t have missed it for the world. She is a devotee of the brand’s designer, Amaka Osakwe, and is even wearing a piece from one of her older collections, a black and dark blue jumpsuit featuring two very sexy slits running up each leg. Savage met Osakwe about seven years ago through their mutual friend Dr. Sid, another Afrobeat artist from Nigeria. Savage has since become one of Maki Oh’s biggest fans. “I love the fact that there’s stuff that I immediately see myself wearing,” she says of Osakwe’s pearly new collection inspired by The Boondocks. “I loved I’d say 95 percent of it,” Savage notes, before thinking better of it, “and the other 5 percent as well.”

Savage keeps up with the cutting edge of Nigerian fashion (she counts Lisa Folawiyo and Deola Sagoe among her other favorites), but the sultry style she shows off in her videos is all her own. Just take the latest visual for her recent track, “49-99” (the title references a Fela Kuti classic). All the clothes in that video were custom-made, from the tasseled cherry red boots to the baby blue schoolgirl’s outfit, based on a traditional design that most Nigerian girls would recognize. “I usually like to put tassels on my costumes onstage,” Savage says of the eye-catching statement boots in particular. “It’s because I loved the girls who used to dance for Fela Kuti, the godfather of Afrobeat. Every time I watched them, their skirts would always have these tassels, and when they were moving and dancing, it made them look so sexy.”

The threaded hair in the clip, too, was important for Savage to get right. “We used to do that growing up, and I wanted to put that in for girls to see, or for guys to be like, ‘I remember I had a crush on a girl who used to do her hair like that!’” Savage exclaims. The impossibly long, Medusa-like artificial braids that she dons later in the clip took two days for a team of six hairstylists to create. “It was so heavy. I couldn’t even stand. I had to lie down to get that shot,” she describes.

Savage was born in Nigeria, and while she now calls that country home, she had a peripatetic upbringing, moving to London at age 11 and later to Boston, where she attended Berklee College of Music on a scholarship. More recently, she has lived in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, where she started writing songs for the likes of Fantasia and Monica. “I got a publishing deal with Sony, but then I felt a void. It was great that I was writing songs for these artists whom I grew up listening to, but I wanted to do my own thing,” Savage says. “I wanted to do Afrobeat so much because I saw how that industry was growing back home. I decided that I was going to give up everything and move back to Nigeria.”