Step Into Designer Mowalola’s Chaotic, Insanely Stylish World In A New Exhibition

When Naomi Campbell was snapped in a white halterneck gown at her Fashion For Relief gala during London Fashion Week spring/summer 2020, a media storm ensued. The press focus was not on the exquisite column cut of the dress, but rather the trompe-l’œil bullet wound at its midriff, with scarlet rivulets trickling down the snow-white leather. It was the work of Mowalola Ogunlesi, the Lagos-born, London-based designer whose young eponymous practice is rooted in a punk marriage of music, sex, politics and visions of new futures. A piece from her spring/summer 2020 collection, “Coming For Blood” (an exploration of the emotional turmoil of falling in love), the dress was an articulation of the designer’s “lived experience as a black person,” she wrote on Instagram. “It shows no matter how well dressed you are or well behaved, we are time after time seen as a walking target,” she continued.

Ogunlesi’s 2017 Central Saint Martins graduation show set the bar: her collection, entitled “Psychedelic”, was a slick, skin-clinging homage to Lagosian petrolheads and 1970s Nigerian psychedelic rock. The two-and-a-half years that followed have seen Ogunlesi leap to heights matched by few of her contemporaries. Not only has she shown two full collections with London talent incubator Fashion East, she’s also dressed Barbie on her 60th anniversary, Kelela, Steve Lacy and Solange, kitted out Nigeria’s national football team and collaborated with rapper Skepta on his Pure Water music video. Her critical success is commercially paralleled: she’s now stocked at Dover Street Market, Opening Ceremony and Canadian etailer Ssense, enjoying “very successful sell-through within a few weeks of the brand going live,” at the latter, according to senior director of womenswear buying Brigitte Chartrand.

Now, Ogunlesi is amplifying the scope of the Mowalola brand, turning her hand to exhibition-making. Opening on 6 December (until 19 January, 2020) at London’s NOW Gallery, Silent Madness offers a full-throttle immersion into the Mowalola universe and its resident creative community. Moreover, it invites you to take part. “For this exhibition, it was about combining the things that inspire me most in the world: music, film and people,” Ogunlesi explains. “I'm creating an experience that allows the individual to come in and experience all of those things at once.”

The show’s visual setting draws inspiration from a concert stage: bringing together a band of Mowalola-wearing mannequins raised on a plinth, garments and prints designed for the occasion, surrounded by a site-specific video installation produced by Jordan Hemingway. As you can probably infer from a collaboration with Hemingway, one of fashion’s favourite goths, the exhibition’s predominant undercurrent is one of dark, apocalyptic chaos. There is, however, an optimistic method to the madness on show. “At the moment, I'm very much about enjoying my life,” says Ogunlesi. “At the same time, I’m trying to be destructive. The only way to change things is actually to just destroy it all and recreate the world from scratch. It’s the end of the old world and the beginning of a new world for the younger generation.”

This staged Armageddon is soundtracked by six specially-commissioned tracks, giving a range of producers – Odunsi (the Engine) and Santi from Lagos’s simmering alté scene; PDA-affiliates Joey LaBeija and Shygirl; KESH; Maison2500, and the visionary experimental Yves Tumor – free creative reign to respond to Ogunlesi’s work. “I wanted the artists to create in response to me,” she says. “I just told them what I was thinking, the energy that I wanted to create and let them take it from there. It’s my way of showcasing my creative community.” Each exhibition attendee will be handed an MP3 player on entry, so they too can, as Ogunlesi says, “just DJ their own experience, to pick what they like and bounce between tracks”

As she has done since her days at Central Saint Martins, Ogunlesi continues to challenge the discourse surrounding African, specifically Nigerian, sexuality. She does note, however, that the perceived Africanness of her work is more of a default, rather than a conscious effect: “I’m Nigerian, so whatever I create is automatically going to be Nigerian work. I don’t feel like I have to brand myself as ‘the African designer’.” In response to an industry tendency towards expecting designers from the continent and its diaspora to situate their work within post-colonial narratives, she says: “The conversations that I want people to be having in Nigeria are the same conversations that people are having here in London. At the end of the day, I’m just a designer making shit that I want to make.”

As the multidisciplinary knack demonstrated in this exhibition shows, Ogunlesi’s creative force is not easily hemmed by discrete boundaries. It’s been clear from the outset that strong musical influences, a painterly sensitivity to colour and an appreciation of photography (see her collaborations with Lea Colombo) are all key features of the Mowalola lexicon. Silent Madness, then, can be thought of as a full-scale actualisation of a creative process that’s been years in the making. “It’s my approach on full volume,” Ogunlesi says, “but it can always go louder!”