There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being documented by someone who does not understand what they are looking at.
For decades, African fashion and the fashion of the African diaspora have been observed, borrowed from, repackaged, and returned to us at a premium, under a different name. Designers from Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and Johannesburg have dressed the world while the world looked past them toward Paris. Tailors who have spent forty years perfecting a construction technique that no European atelier can replicate have been called "craftsmen" and never architects, never masters. The street style that generated entire seasons of Western collections was called "tribal" before it was called "inspiration".
Omiren Styles exists because that story needed correcting, not from the outside, but from within.
This is our inaugural edition, and we chose to open with hair. Not because hair is frivolous. Quite the opposite. We chose hair because it is the first thing that has been legislated. The first thing that has been policed, relaxed, covered, and reclaimed. The shape of Black hair is the shape of a longer argument, one that fashion has been having with power for centuries. To understand what we are building here, you have to start from this: this is not a magazine that explains itself to outsiders. We are not a bridge. We are a destination. We are also an industry record, written from inside the work, not from the spectator seats.
Inside Issue 001, you will find African tailoring examined on its own financial terms. You will find Kente cloth read not as a textile but as a constitutional record. You will travel with us to Lagos and Accra, where the grammar of everyday dress requires no translation. You will meet ten designers who were handed a brief that said "make it accessible to a global audience" and declined it entirely, building collections that answer to no one outside the culture they dress in.
And you will find an opinion piece that says plainly what many of us have been thinking for years: stop calling it "ethical fashion". It is simply fashion. Made by people whose work has always mattered.
Welcome to Omiren Styles. We have been here the whole time.
Rex Clarke
Founder and Editorial Director, Omiren Styles
