The Trendy Nigerian.

This semester I started a class on African Literature and because of the broad nature of the idea Africa and the field of study literature, we discuss a lot of things that are African and Literature. African Literature cannot be exactly defined but the closest definition is“Literature that is African”, one of the hundred definitions of literature is that it is a mirror of the society. So it should come as no surprise that in a class where the basic discussions centre around things that reflect or mirror the African society, the idea of our native clothes came up and how the way Africans or Nigerians in particular always tend to buy English clothes and do not regale themselves in the beautiful fabrics of the African culture, as strange and bizarre as it sounds we have some people who don’t own a stitch of traditional wear. Our society and government has allowed for us to proudly wear the clothes that our colonial masters left behind for us to wear, to work in the white collar world you need to own a minimum of two suits, which I bet you is not agreeable with our weather and despite our pride in being an independent state we are acting exactly the way the our English maters expect us to, even though most of them are dead. We have dropped the “barbaric” nature of dress and picked the sophisticated English way of dressing.

Now I’m not saying we should go back to dressing the way our forefathers did and all that or we should totally drop the English way of dressing, there should be an incorporation of both in all our attires, a mix of the traditional and the English, not English wears throughout. Recently a fashion house; Sheels Clothing Inc, just released a fashion line called the Trendy Nigerian, and I have to say, these designs though in English style but with the use of Ankara, are things a person in the corporate world could wear without necessarily looking like they are going for a wedding, these are outfits you could wear for parties, to work, to classes (depends on your school) and any other place you may consider important. The good thing about this line is that the clothes are sophisticated, chic and cool at the same time they reflect the beauty of African fabric. The designer of this line created the designs with the idea of an English look represented with traditional fabric. We lost a lot to colonialism and we are still losing to it, but if we all can take a stand and choose to at least fight the continual decline of our culture with our dressing and say, let’s hold on to this tiny piece of our identity then we can in a small way beat our chests and call ourselves independent.
Below are some pictures from the fashion line.