Aindrea Emelife: I’m joined by Dr Christine Checinska, Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Textiles and Fashion at the V&A, whose work explores cloth, culture and race. I’m also joined by Zara Odu, founder of Roundabout, who has spent eighteen years in the continent’s fashion and creative industries and, as I mentioned, collaborated on the commission for this programme. Thank you both for joining.

AE: I wanted to start with the idea of the archive and independence. Christine, I remember visiting Africa Fashion and being so overwhelmed by the sheer possibility of it. I was curious whether bringing in the archive, or expanding what people think of as the archive, was an intention in your work.

Christine Checinska: That’s a really great question. My role at the V&A, which I stepped into six years ago, was primarily to extend our collection and our archives to include work by African and African diaspora designers and textile creators, photographers, and fashionsilhouettes. Our collection was actually quite small. So “animating the archive” is a strange idea to answer, because we were building the archive. It’s only really now that I would say we have a foundation that we continue to build. We’ve made over 200 new acquisitions through that one project, and that’s ongoing.

Acquisitions are important. They mean we were able to play our part in writing people and industries into history. A very special Nigerian designer was generous enough to share her personal archive, so that we could keep her story within the history of global fashion. That was an absolute intention of the exhibition: to pass the mic to historical designers, putting them back into history, and, for the contemporary designers, to put them within that broader context of global fashion.

AE: Thank you. I’m curious what you think the Africa Fashion show did for contemporary designers, and how the archive can connect with designers now, so that it is not seen as an anomaly.

Zara Odu: Some of them are getting by day to day, designing as they can, selling as they can. What was special was seeing that you paid for their garments. That says something to the brand. It tells them they are worthy of being put in a great museum like the V&A.

We’re talking about archives today, and these brands need to understand that the work they’re doing is not lost, and that in fifty years designers coming up will reference them. Designers themselves aren’t always able to think about the future. They’re thinking about now, because of the day-to-day reality of business in Nigeria and across Africa. So to be able to approach them and say, we value your work, you’ve added so much to the archive, I think that’s special, and not only for the brands but for the brands that come after.

AE: What else can we glean from the archive? We talk about the literal visual material and the musical inspiration, but how might we think of it as a resource aligned to production, and to making and style?

ZO: Absolutely. This is something we do all the time. The archive is essential for us as designers. Christine and I were looking at a private collection together: the intricacy, the indigo, even the hands, after fifty years, stained with indigo, and the delicate patterns and the stories told in the garments. You’re just so inspired. You realise we’re not making it the same way, and we’re not appreciating it the same way the makers used to appreciate garments and textiles.

When you look to the past, it gives you some sort of fuel for the future. We’re always saying, as African brands, that we innovate, that it’s part of who we are, but because we’re designing for one world, we sometimes forget. So we encourage brands to look to the past, because to look to the future you have to acknowledge the past.

AE: Christine, how do you embrace the idea of heritage as something shifting, and how is that presented in an exhibition, with this post-independence reckoning within the presentation?

CC: I’ll always start by saying that all cultures are hybrid and all heritage is shifting. Nothing is that static. Designers draw on everything around them in everyday life, and fashion is no different.

In the pre-independence moment, particularly in Nigeria and Ghana, if you look at elite fashion, people were still looking to Europe. They were influenced by what was happening in Paris. When you look at that 1958 photograph of Miss Nigeria in Paris, she’s wearing something we’d typically see in a couture show in Paris at that time: that shift dress, the move from the New Look of the 1940s to sleeker shapes that show off a woman’s curves in another way. So what you get in pre-independence Nigeria and Ghana is this blending, this fluidity between styles. Someone might wear a traditional ensemble, but they might equally wear a tailored suit. Among the elite women, there was a trend for wearing saris, for example. So you have local trends, European trends, and then this constantly shifting West African trend.

I struggle with terms like “traditional” and “heritage”. Sometimes they can be problematic, because they almost fix West African style, whether it’s Nigerian or Ghanaian, as something unchanging, and that’s really not true when you dig into it. And then, after independence, you get this drive towards showcasing the newly independent nations through dress. You start to get more distinctions in the way women dress. And Nkrumah, for example: if you look at documentary footage of him, he’s absolutely playing to his audience. He knows when to put on a suit. He knows when to put on something else. He’s playing with the power of fashion to communicate non-verbally.

AE: You mentioned a “new look”. I remember one of the pages uses exactly those words: is this Africa’s new look? I was thinking about what it means to choose what you wear to represent your nation, and then go to France and wear that. Zara, I’d love to hear about the commission, and what you were discussing when you chose that image.

ZO: We looked at about four images that really inspired us, and we went with Miss Nigeria in Paris because, as we were saying earlier, it’s 1958, two years before independence. We thought: what would it have been like for a young woman in Nigeria to be Miss Nigeria and to travel, maybe for the first time out of the country? In my work with brands I find a very similar place: where I am, where I want to be, and this world beyond. So we took the sash, representing Nigeria, and what that means for a young woman, and tried to keep the silhouette.

In the picture, you can’t tell whether the dress is a local textile or an imported one. Recent research suggests that lace was made in Nigeria too. The garment merges worlds. I used aso-oke for the sash to show heritage. I know, I hit you with “heritage”, sorry. When we looked at sourcing, we said we needed textiles from the sixties. We bought lace that was found from the sixties. It arrived really dusty. And the aso-oke was kindly lent to us: sixty-, seventy-, eighty-year-old aso-oke. So it was about combining the new and the old, looking to the past for inspiration but making sure it’s still relevant today.

We said we needed a dress, because if you look at a magazine, or the DRUM pages, you’re very much inspired, but sometimes when you have that piece in real life, it puts things in perspective. In my work, I’m always toying with this idea of show and tell.

AE: I also put some images in the slideshow of politicians around independence wearing national dress in their speeches. Christine, I was interested in where so-called African identity is allowed or celebrated to show up, and how that changes over time. Has that been in mind in your selection of contemporary designers?

CC: Africa Fashion took me six years, but sometimes it feels like a lifetime, because so much of my thinking and the team’s thinking is in that project. It’s even in the title. You’ll notice it’s Africa Fashion, and that missing “n” was very important to me and the team, because it allowed us to keep alive the sense that African fashions look and feel like many different things and can be so varied.

We wanted to give people, particularly in the West and the global north, a glimpse of the diversity of cultures on the continent, and of the aesthetics and priorities of fashion practitioners. We knew we couldn’t show all the fashion, because that would be impossible. I deliberately use the plural every time I speak, to keep alive that sense of plurality. My approach was to pass the mic to the creators in the show, to give them a platform to speak about their work in the way they want to be spoken about. Every time, the contemporary floor began with minimalism, and that is the word the designers used themselves. All of the groupings in Africa Fashion came from me and my team listening to the creatives. We wanted to shake people’s expectations. African fashions are more than print. Yes, print is wonderful, but there’s so much more.

That’s one of the things I’ll take away from Lagos: innovation is all around. The energy of this city, the way young people mobilise their creativity and almost make something out of nothing, is incredible. We hear people speaking about a new Pan-Africanism, and this desire to build a sustainable fashion ecosystem rooted in African sensibilities. That’s what we were trying to bring to the public.

AE: I was also thinking about second-hand clothing and the images of markets in Ghana, and how the import of cloth tells a story about value and unequal exchange. I’m curious how more sustainable practices can be recovered from the archive.

ZO: People are very quick to say African fashion is one thing: it needs to be print. I think we need to start rethinking what we’ve been told African fashion is. Designers are told, we’re not going to show your work in the US or the UK because they need more print, or, it’s not African enough. That ends the creativity of a designer.

To your question: when we’re thinking about sustainability and longevity, and how we used to create in the past, we can’t engage until we understand. When brands really go deep and ask, what does it mean to dye with indigo? How did we embroider in the past? Where did it come from, what part of Nigeria, what skill? What I’ve found with a lot of older designers is that they did the research. You can’t achieve greatness if you’re not going to dig deep. It’s not that everybody needs one single box, but when you know better, you can do better.

We talk about sustainability as a very surface thing: oh, this is made from hand-woven cloth, so it’s sustainable. We haven’t considered whether the people who are weaving are supported, whether the systems and structures are in place.

I’ll never forget a designer in a programme in Paris, doing a presentation, who said the woman who does his dyes swears that she can drink it. That’s how clean it is, how pure. I was amazed, because not a lot of people say that. The designer should not be removed from the craft. Even if you can’t do anything about it at that moment, because working in certain contexts can be very difficult, it’s the knowledge that allows you to do more in the future.

AE: As you were discussing dyes, I started thinking about museums. If we commission a dress, we have to think about how we’re going to keep it. But should we also be archiving intangible heritage, like the methods of dyeing, the pigments? Christine, are these questions you come up against at the V&A?

CC: At a museum like the V&A, we are, I recognise, privileged. But what’s wonderful is that we have departments where we collect and acquire exactly those production materials: dye recipes, notebooks, sketchbooks. They’re as accessible to the public as our actual dresses and accessories. The museum was founded on making. The inspiration for creating the V&A in the first place was to collect and display what was deemed excellent work, to inspire contemporary creators.

The other thing we do: when we acquire something, we interview the maker. We gather those stories, and they’re on record and accessible to the public. It could be about the dyestuffs used, exactly what you’re describing, and how the garments were made. And our textile conservation team is quite used to giving advice to other museums, whether on the continent, in Europe or in the US. It’s our role as curators and conservators to be generous and share our knowledge and expertise.

AE: Zara, my last question before I open to the audience. What does it mean for a contemporary fashion designer in Nigeria to work with a museum? Given the landscape of museums in Nigeria now, are there ways we, as a museum, can make that more desirable?

ZO: Designers are now conscious and intentional about their practice and very interested in keeping their garments. We saw some stencils from the sixties that were broken, and some garments in boxes, and it made us think about how people can archive and keep their own pieces. That’s new in this space.

I remember, a long time ago, we used to say, don’t sell your samples, never sell your samples, but we didn’t have that culture. This is new, now that people understand that museums are acquiring them and are willing to pay for them, and that in the future people can reference them. So I think partnerships with institutions would be great. Even the grants are thinking along that line. I’m pushing that agenda.

Audience member: I’m from the United States, and in our context a lot of what ends up in high fashion is directly informed by Black street style. Is there a similar pipeline here? And my second question: I’m confused about what Nigeria is as a country, because so many peoples and cultures are represented. How does that flow into national identity?

ZO: It’s a very layered question, and not something we can answer simply. Even within the ethnic groups in Nigeria there are a lot of differences. Someone asked recently why we talk about aso-oke and adire so much, and the answer was that we’re in this part of Nigeria. If we were in another part, we’d use other clothes more. I do think place has a lot to do with identity. A lot of the designers we’re talking about are based in Lagos, so their first attempt at proper design is shaped by that, but we’re not digging deep enough. Everyone’s describing whatever is available. You have to be brave as a designer to step out of your comfort zone. That’s why design can sometimes be at the surface level.

It’s a very touchy subject, but I think it’s a very important question, and I like that it’s a non-Nigerian asking it. We Nigerians are so used to dancing around the tribes. It’s nice to hear someone ask.

The first question was about street style. I think today everything influences everything. Designers are looking at Pinterest, designers are looking at YouTube. I know designers who are self-taught just by watching Saint Laurent on YouTube, back to back to back. That’s how they learn, and that goes into Nigerian design.

CC: I agree with you. A very strict trickle-down of fashion trends doesn’t really exist any more. There’s much more cross-pollination. In my role I don’t recognise those hierarchies. I would acquire everything that meets the criteria, and what I deem to be excellence in making and design.

For example, one of the projects I’m working on at the moment is the wardrobe of a Nigerian woman, now very elderly. She has a collection of beautiful garments in Lagos, some never worn, and she asked her daughter to contact the V&A. They span the 1950s through to the early 2000s. I could be acquiring Christopher John Rogers one minute, and then this wardrobe, and it’s an honour when someone comes forward and it’s the best dress of an everyday woman. We’re talking about contextual material too: photographs, passports, letters. Some of the pieces are handmade lace. These are dying arts. I don’t have a team, so if you want to lobby the V&A to give me one, that would be very nice. It’s a very slow process.

I sometimes wonder about the role of museums and what they will look like in the future. A museum still comes straight out of a colonial project that categorises people and things. If you look into the V&A’s history, and this is quite typical, certain African objects were sent to the British Museum, because Africa was not considered to have design. So I can see how museums might be read as part of that colonial project. It’s our role as a contemporary museum to start reimagining what museums are. Open them up and trouble them. Make some noise.

AE: Amazing. That sounds like a really great place to end. These are things we’re thinking about as a new institution: how to shape our vision, what to encompass. What you include tells the story, and embracing that dynamism, not being fixed, is potentially a way to move past the colonial association museums have.

I got a text from my mother a couple of weeks ago. She didn’t know this project was happening. She wrote, oh my gosh, DRUM. And she started talking about growing up between Nigeria and Jamaica, and all these stories that have never been uncovered. I think that’s a really good case study of how you can bring another level of knowledge production to projects like this, having people search for their surname or the street they grew up on, finding these histories and finding connectivity with the material. That’s the result that would make us happy, and fulfill one of our missions at MOWAA.

With that, thank you both. Please do stick around, read the quotes, and keep an eye out on the streets of Lagos. And please spend some time with the commission, which is at the back.

DRUM Cover Stories is MOWAA’s November 2026 programme in Lagos, part of the Lagos Art Season. It includes a showcase of ten issues of the Nigerian edition of DRUM (1959 to 1969) at Mbari Kola: The Arts Society, from 30 October to 30 November 2026; DRUM posters across Lagos from 2 to 30 November; and A Place for Dreams, designed by Abiola Olusola in collaboration with Roundabout, which responds to the 1958 DRUM feature “Miss Nigeria to Paris”. MOWAA’s archive comprises more than 1,000 issues from Nigeria and Ghana.

Christine Checinska is Senior Curator of African and African Diaspora Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and curated Africa Fashion. Zara Odu is a Nigerian creative and brand consultant and the founder of Roundabout and of Designers Consociate. Aindrea Emelife is Head of Curatorial at MOWAA.

This conversation has been edited and condensed from a recording of the public discussion.