Africa Is a Country

Nigeria Fashion Week

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Nigeria Fashion Week

By
Tom Devriendt

Probably to coincide with New York Fashion Week, Vice released the Nigerian installment of its “Fashion International” series. It’s not bad considering how Vice usually treats Africa (reference: Congo, Liberia and Ghana) and it definitely captures some of the energy of Nigeria. But it can’t help itself. We’re barely a minute into Vice’s report (“looking for something beautiful behind the depressing headlines”) on Nigeria’s 2011 fashion week when we’re told Lagos is troubled by “civil unrest, religious tension and wide-spread corruption” that “have lead to calls for the resignation of long-standing president Goodluck Jonathan.” Pretty prescient. The first Nigerian to get some words in is the “fantastically named” fashion week’s organizer Lexy Mojo-Eyes “who looks like Don King”; next up are the fashion week’s female models (but it quickly gets too “naked”, so the reporter moves on to the male models), wondering why they love “to represent Africa.”

It gets better after the 5:00 mark, pitting general male vanity against the recently proposed self-righteous anti-gay bill and homophobic sentiments in local press. (We’ll ignore how the reporter slides from ‘traditional African beauty’ over ‘pure Nigerian beauty’ to back-stage ‘pure Nigerian chaos’ — do French fashion back-stages look anything less chaotic?)

It’s a decent document (and rare in its portraying of gay figures –albeit in a stereotypical fashion context– where Nigerian pastors and politicians would rather see them outlawed).

One question though: what is it about “being on a yacht under African skies” that makes journalists “lose control of [their] senses”?

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