Tide Chen Lagos at Africa Fashion Week Nigeria 2025 – Ayomitide Okungbaye stages the most quietly radical collection of the season. But does the execution fully match the ambition?
TIDE CHEN LAGOS | AFRICA FASHION WEEK NIGERIA | DECEMBER 2025 | DESIGNER: AYOMITIDE EVELYN OKUNGBAYE
There is a school of thought in Nigerian fashion criticism that says a designer must earn the right to work with an indigenous textile. That the fabric must choose the designer as much as the designer chooses the fabric. By that measure, Ayomitide Okungbaye has more than earned her right to Seghosen cloth. The question Sengwa: A Woven Realities Tale asks its audience to consider is a harder one: now that she has earned it, has she fully realised it?
The short answer is largely yes, with room that the designer herself would likely acknowledge. This is a collection of genuine and, in places, profound achievement. It is also a collection that, in its most ambitious moments, reveals the distance between a singular creative vision and the infrastructure required to fully deliver it at runway scale. That tension is not a flaw. In a designer at this stage of their international trajectory, it is a sign of something more interesting: a practice that is growing faster than its own edges.
“Seghosen cloth has never needed validation from the runway. What it needed was a context in which the world could see what it already was.” – Ayomitide Okungbaye
THE CONCEPT: RADICAL RESTRAINT
Let us begin with what Sengwa gets unambiguously right. The conceptual framework is extraordinary. Seghosen cloth – a handwoven textile indigenous to the Owo communities of Ondo State, historically confined to ceremonial use and almost entirely absent from contemporary Nigerian ready-to-wear, is not an obvious choice for a runway collection. It is an act of deliberate excavation. And the research behind that excavation is visible in every garment.
Okungbaye has spent years in direct engagement with the weavers and communities that produce this textile. That depth of knowledge shows. Where lesser designers working with indigenous fabrics tend to treat them as decorative surfaces, applying heritage cloth to modern silhouettes as though the fabric were wallpaper, Okungbaye builds around the material logic of the cloth itself. The weave structure informs the construction. The textile’s ceremonial weight informs the garment’s relationship with the body. This is not cultural borrowing. It is cultural fluency.
In that sense, Sengwa makes the most important argument a Nigerian fashion collection can make in 2025: that indigenous textiles are not supporting characters in the story of contemporary African luxury. They are the story.
[Image: Structured co-ord set from Sengwa: A Woven Realities Tale. Tide Chen Lagos, AFWN December 2025. Photography: [Credit]]
THE COLLECTION: WHAT LANDS, WHAT STRAINS
The strongest pieces in Sengwa are its most controlled. The structured co-ord sets demonstrate with quiet authority that Seghosen cloth has the tensile qualities for tailored, architectural construction – a claim that needed to be proven on the body, and here it is. The fabric holds its line. It does not fight the structure imposed on it. It participates in it. This is a designer who understands that the relationship between cloth and construction is a conversation, not a command.
The sleeveless tailored suit is the collection’s most resolved piece and, arguably, its most significant. Spare and precise, it strips away every possible distraction and lets the textile make its own argument. It is an act of curatorial confidence that many designers twice Okungbaye’s experience would not have the restraint to make. The suit says: this cloth needs nothing added to it. It is enough.
The reconstructed draping is more uneven. The ambition – to explore the textile’s relationship with the body beyond the conventions of tailoring – is clear and correct. The execution in two or three looks suggests the designer is still finding the grammar for this particular sentence. The draping reads as exploratory in the most honest sense: this is work in progress, thinking out loud in fabric. For some critics, that will read as incompleteness. This reviewer reads it as evidence of a practice actively at its frontier.
The woven panelling – incorporating Seghosen cloth into hybrid construction alongside other materials, is technically accomplished but raises the collection’s most interesting critical question: at what point does the integration of a ceremonially significant textile into a hybrid garment risk diluting the very thing that makes it worth preserving? Okungbaye navigates this tension with more skill than most, but it is a question the collection does not fully resolve, and one that her future work will need to answer with increasing clarity as her international profile grows.
“Sengwa is an Owo word meaning beautiful. The collection is about the reality that exists inside the cloth itself – its history, its hands, its meaning. I wanted to make garments that honour that reality rather than cover it.” – Ayomitide Okungbaye
THE CONTEXT: A MOVEMENT, NOT AN ANOMALY
Sengwa did not appear in a vacuum. The December 2025 edition of Africa Fashion Week Nigeria reflected a broader and accelerating shift in Nigerian fashion – a movement away from familiar international fabric choices and toward rigorous, research-led engagement with indigenous weaving traditions. Dimeji Ilori’s Kwara Heritage collection brought sculptural new silhouettes to Aso Ofi. The dialogue extended into the season’s Lagos Fashion Week with Hertunba’s Agu Florentina continuing her sustained engagement with Akwette traditions. Cynthia Abila advanced her exploration of Adire and Aso-oke and, through Ghanaian designer Jason Jermaine Asiedu of Jermaine Bleu, across West African borders entirely.
Within this movement, Okungbaye’s position is distinctive and specific. The other designers named above are working within established textile conversations – Aso-oke, Adire, Akwette, Kente all have documented runway histories and existing critical frameworks. Seghosen cloth has none of that. Okungbaye is not contributing to an existing conversation. She is initiating one. That is a categorically different and more demanding undertaking, and it must be assessed accordingly.
THE WIDER RECORD: CREDIBILITY BEYOND THE RUNWAY
A runway review that does not account for a designer’s wider context is an incomplete assessment. In Okungbaye’s case, the context is instructive. Guardian Nigeria’s Editor-in-Chief Chidirim Ndeche has documented the story of Tide Chen Lagos and the global reinvention of Seghosen cloth in a major editorial profile – one of the first treatments of the brand to position it within the international conversation around African luxury and textile heritage. Fashion Network, the global fashion industry trade press, has covered the broader Nigerian handwoven textile movement in which Tide Chen Lagos is a central voice. A visual campaign produced with a French production company has extended the Seghosen story to European fashion audiences who had no prior reference for the textile.
The commercial picture is equally telling. Tide Chen Lagos has secured significant retail investment from international buyers – a fact that is not incidental to a critical assessment of the collection. A designer whose work performs commercially in international markets is one whose creative decisions are being tested against real demand. Sengwa is not a collection made for Nigerian critics alone. It is a collection made for the world, and the world, on the evidence available, is interested.
“Nigeria has extraordinary textile traditions that the world has not yet been properly introduced to. My work is about making those introductions with the depth and seriousness those traditions deserve.” – Ayomitide Okungbaye
VERDICT
Sengwa: A Woven Realities Tale is the most important collection shown at Africa Fashion Week Nigeria in December 2025, not because it is the most technically complete, but because it does something none of the other collections attempted: it introduces a textile tradition with no contemporary runway history to an international fashion audience, and it does so with sufficient rigour, creative intelligence, and commercial conviction to make that introduction stick.
Ayomitide Okungbaye is a designer in full command of her subject matter and still finding the outer edges of her craft vocabulary. That combination, deep knowledge, expanding execution – is precisely what serious fashion criticism should be looking for. The questions Sengwa raises are the right questions. The answers, when they come, will be worth watching.
Tide Chen Lagos is building something that matters. Sengwa is the most compelling evidence yet that it is building it well.
