Vogue Features Maki Oh Spring 2016 Ready To Wear Collection

It isn’t every day you see a Nigerian designer featured on vogue.com , with a review that speaks depth and wisdom about the design pieces created by the designer.

Maki Oh releases her Spring Ready To Wear collection and the pieces by designer Amaka Asakwe are simply life personified. According to Vogue,  Amaka described these pieces based on Sisyphus as well as Camus’s quote, “Our life is built on the hope for tomorrow, yet tomorrow brings us closer to death,” and the Yoruba trick, among parents, of sending their bored kids around to nearby homes in search of “arodan,” a thing that doesn’t actually exist. The Almodóvar film Talk to Her and the karuwai courtesans of northern Nigeria were bouncing around Osakwe’s head space as well, making for a rich brew. Which, in the end, was the point: Life may be futile, Osakwe’s collection posited, but it is also deliciously full.

According to Vogue,

” Osakwe’s engagement with existential absurdism freed her up. There was a new sense of looseness in the silhouettes, witnessed particularly in Osakwe’s terrific, fluid trousers, and a refreshing playfulness found in the collection’s rather daffy approach to embellishment and print. Scalloped edges, thread embroidery, a dash of distressed denim, graphic appliqué, feathers, fringe, Lurex mesh—Osakwe had at it, coercing coherence from the mix with her innate sense of discipline. She gave herself permission to experiment, in other words, but the overall effect was far from slapdash. And a few of her flourishes had a philosophical weight one doesn’t often discover in clothes: Note, for instance, the indigo teardrop print, which, when you peered inside the tears, revealed an underprint of delicate flowers. Osakwe is a designer with an urgent need for her clothes to mean something; this time out she encompassed that meaning in looks that were her most wearable yet. Why wear a relaxed, ruffled dress of geometric black broderie anglaise? Why not? Life is short. We take our pleasures where we find them.”

Source: Vogue.com