Tomorrow, Lagos Cocktail Week kickstarts its 12th edition across multiple venues in the city before culminating at Cocktail Village on October 22 and 23 at the Balmoral Convention Centre, Federal Palace Hotel, Victoria Island. 

The theme this year is “Africa Pours Into Lagos.” Lara Rawa, founder of Eventi Cocktails, started the festival in 2014 as a celebration of Nigerian cocktail culture. Twelve years later, it has grown into a continental gathering, bringing bartenders across borders and African drinking cultures into the same city, while international brands set up alongside Nigerian independents. 

Much of that growth has happened alongside increased brand investment in the culture, with companies returning year after year through partnerships, activations and events that have helped expand the spaces around cocktails in Lagos.

The question Lagos Cocktail Week 2026 raises is not whether drink brands belong in Lagos’ creative scene. The more useful question is what they are building there, and what happens when commercial investment becomes part of the infrastructure of culture.

Jameson’s relationship with Lagos goes beyond putting its name on an event. The Jameson Distillery on Tour 3.0 ran for five days at the National Theatre from September 27 to October 1, 2024, bringing together whiskey tastings, masterclasses, food collaborations with Kevwe & Cam and Kewa’s Kitchen, and a finale produced with Mainland Block Party. 

The programme placed the brand across food, music and nightlife, inside one of the city’s most culturally significant venues. Jameson is also a long-term partner of Street Souk, the streetwear convention founded by Iretidayo Zaccheaus in 2018 that has grown into one of Lagos’ major annual cultural events. 

Across these partnerships, Jameson is doing more than reaching an existing audience. It is putting money and infrastructure behind particular cultural spaces, becoming part of the ecosystem that allows them to keep growing.

‍Red Bull’s approach makes that logic more explicit. Dance Your Style Nigeria is now in its sixth consecutive year, with qualifier events in Abuja, Ibadan, Enugu, Port Harcourt and Lagos, before the national winner represents Nigeria at the World Final in Zurich later this year. Red Bull Basement, which returned in April 2026, drew more than 3,000 applications from Nigerian innovators competing for a platform and mentorship.

Red Bull Spin It Loud has also brought the brand into Lagos’ music scene through activations at SOL Beach Elegushi. Across these programmes, Red Bull is creating platforms around specific creative practices, from dance and innovation to music, and investing in them over time. A dancer competing at Dance Your Style is engaging with a platform built specifically around their craft, which creates a different relationship between the brand and its audience from simply sponsoring a concert or placing a logo at an event.

Not every drink brand operating in Lagos’ event scene is a multinational with a global budget. Quacktails, which sells cocktails and mocktails in pouches and delivers to homes and events from its base in Lekki Phase 1, has built its presence through partnerships with Jägermeister at Lagos nightlife events and through products that make a distinctly Lagos argument about what a cocktail can be. 

The Lagos Cream reimagines Irish Cream using Guinness FES, palm spirit, milk, nutmeg, cinnamon and vanilla. “Guinness is Quacked,” the brand says. The reference point is international, the ingredients are local, and the product sits somewhere between the two, reflecting the way Lagos continues to absorb global drinking culture and remake it around its own tastes.

Nitecap operates at a different register entirely. Founded by Laolu Onifade, who previously built Hytch, a logistics technology company, and Brilstash, which he sold to a Nigerian bank, Nitecap is a ready-to-drink canned cocktail and mocktail brand available on Chowdeck and through retail and hospitality partners in Lagos, Abeokuta and Abuja. 

Within its first two months, the brand sold more than 3,000 drinks and reached $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Onifade’s reference points are BuzzBallz, Moth Drinks and Liquid Death, brands that have shown him how a drink can carry personality, culture and community alongside the product itself. “I want Nitecap to become part of the moments people remember,” he said in a September 2026 interview. His ambition extends beyond Lagos: “We’re starting in Africa, but we’re not thinking of ourselves as an African beverage company that can only exist in African markets.” 

Lagos Cocktail Week 2026 opens this month with the Lagos Bar Show, a new flagship experience replacing the festival’s traditional Bar Hop, before Cocktail Village brings everything together at Balmoral on October 22 and 23. 

The brands that show up there are not simply marketing within Lagos’ event culture. Some have spent years investing in the spaces and communities around it. The creative people who move through these events, from bartenders and dancers to streetwear buyers, mixologists and founders, get tangible value from that investment: platforms, exposure, income and a stage. 

In return, brands get attention, participation and the kind of cultural credibility that cannot be bought through media spend alone. The relationship is commercial, but it has also become part of how Lagos’ creative scene functions.

Cover Credit: Jameson Distillery on Tour 2025

Kenyan music in the early 2000s was a game of competing sounds, shifting allegiances and artists fighting to define what the country’s hip-hop should and would sound like. 

At the centre of it all was Kleptomaniax, the Nairobi trio of Nyashinski, Collo (Collins Majale) and Roba (Robert Manyasa). Having emerged from the same high school, Nairobi School, in the late 1990s, the group found a home at Ogopa Deejays, where they helped popularise Kapuka — a dance-oriented sound that would become synonymous with the era. Their music was catchy, irreverent and unapologetically Kenyan, but not everyone was ready to give it its flowers.

Released in January 2005, M4E (Maniax 4 Ever) arrived at a time when Kenyan urban music was finding its feet and its voice. Across 15 tracks, Kleptomaniax moved between hip-hop, pop and the dance-floor rhythms that made Kapuka a cultural force. Songs like “Freak It", “Haree” and "Swing” captured the trio’s playful approach to music, making room for rap without sacrificing the hooks and infectious energy that kept listeners coming back. But beyond the hits and party-ready production, the album was also released at a time when Kapuka’s growing popularity had some hip-hop purists questioning whether the sound deserved to be taken seriously.

The debate was hardly new. As the sound gained popularity, some hip-hop purists questioned the legitimacy of the commercially successful sound associated with Ogopa Deejays. For artists like Kleptomaniax, the criticism raised questions about whether music made for the dance floor could command the same respect as more traditional forms of hip-hop. Rather than shy away from the conversation, the trio confronted it in their music. “What Is Kapuka”made the genre itself a subject, while “Tuendelee" would become one of their most memorable responses to the critics.

Released as a single in 2004 before appearing on M4E, “Tuendelee” – Swahili for ‘let’s continue’ – captured the group's refusal to let the debate dictate their direction. The song became associated with the tensions between Kapuka artists and hip-hop purists, turning a dispute over sound and credibility into a defining moment in Kenyan music history. Its message was simple, but its staying power was anything but: keep moving, keep making music and let the work speak for itself.

YetTuendelee outlived the controversy that helped make it famous. Its impact lay not only in the shots fired or the arguments it fuelled, but also in what it represented for a generation of Kenyan artists determined to make music on their own terms. The song helped cement Kleptomaniax's place in the country's musical memory, carrying the spirit of an era when local artists were testing the boundaries between hip-hop and pop, commercial appeal and cultural credibility. More than two decades later, its title still feels like a fitting instruction for an industry that continues to evolve.

Elsewhere on M4E, the group showed that their appeal extended beyond the controversies surrounding Kapuka. The album's collaborations, including “Au Sio” featuring Mr. Lenny and “Sichimbiki” featuring BIGPIN, reflected a scene built on shared sounds and creative exchange. Across the project, Kleptomaniax embraced the freedom to experiment, making music that could soundtrack a night out while remaining rooted in the language, humour and rhythms of home. They were not simply chasing a trend; they were helping shape the sound of Kenyan youth culture at a time when the local industry was becoming increasingly confident in its own identity.

The group's journey would eventually take its members in different directions, with Nyashinski later establishing a successful solo career. But M4E remains an important chapter in the story of Kleptomaniax and the wider evolution of Kenyan popular music. It recalls a time when every new release could shift the conversation, when disagreements over genre became part of the culture and when artists were carving out space for sounds that did not always fit neatly into existing definitions.

Kleptomaniax may have had their share of critics, but history has been kind to the sound they helped build. If the years have softened the edges of the old rivalries, they have done little to dull the music. With M4E, the trio captured a scene in motion; with Tuendelee, they gave it a soundtrack for pushing forward. Sometimes the best response is not to stop and argue, but to keep making noise.

Cover: Kleptomaniax Album image

Few artists have shaped Kenya’s hip-hop conversation as consistently as Octopizzo. The bar-spitting veteran’s career has grown from the streets of Kibera into a body of work spanning music, culture and social impact. From the raw ambition of S.O.N. (Strugglers of Nairobi) to the socially conscious Refugeenius, the genre-bending Jungle Fever and the coastal romance of Lamu Nights, he has spent nearly two decades refusing to sit still. 

Earlier this year came In The Meantime, a project that, even in its title, suggested a pause between what had been and what was still coming. Now, that “meantime” has given way to his ninth studio album, IBRAHYMN – a more introspective body of work that finds the rapper looking inward at identity, faith, mortality, power, youth and what it means to grow older on the continent. 

Debuting at number one on the Apple Music Top Albums in Kenya chart, IBRAHYMN marks another evolution in Octopizzo’s already expansive catalogue. Across its 14 tracks, the album reaches beyond Kenya, bringing together artists and influences from across the continent while keeping Nairobi firmly at its centre. 

That wider ambition carries into the album’s visual rollout, with Octopizzo treating its music videos as extensions of the world he is building around the record rather than simple accompaniments to the songs. The result is a project that feels increasingly interested in image, identity and mythology as much as it is in bars. 

It is also a natural progression for an artist whose work has long stretched beyond music. Through the Octopizzo Foundation, his creative platform has become a vehicle for youth development and community work, giving another dimension to the questions of purpose and legacy that run through IBRAHYMN. More aptly the album arrives at a point where the music heavyweight appears less interested in proving that he can rap than in asking what the music is supposed to mean after the proving is done.

Conversing with Deeds, Octopizzo reflects on IBRAHYMN, creative reinvention, the changing landscape of African hip-hop, his relationship with Kibera, the responsibility that comes with growing older and what he ultimately hopes his catalogue will leave behind. 

Stanley for Deeds: For readers discovering you and your music for the first time, how do you introduce yourself at this stage of your life and career?

I’m Octopizzo. I’m an artist, but I’ve never really seen myself as just a musician. I’m a product of Kibera, of Nairobi, of Africa and of every experience that tried to break me and somehow became material for the music.

At this stage of my life, I’m less interested in introducing myself through titles and more interested in what I’ve built. I’m a storyteller, a student of life, a father, a creative, a social entrepreneur, and somebody who has spent over a decade turning survival into sound.

I came from a place where sometimes having a dream was already an act of rebellion. So everything I’ve done since has been about proving that where you come from can inform your story without defining your destination. I’m still Octopizzo, just with more scars, more wisdom, more questions and a much bigger canvas.

IBRAHYMN arrives after more than a decade of albums, experiments and reinventions. What did you want this project to say or explore that you hadn’t already said before?

IBRAHYMN is not me trying to prove that I can rap. I’ve already had that conversation with myself a long time ago. This album is me asking bigger questions. What happens when the kid who was once fighting to be heard finally gets the microphone and realizes the world is much bigger than his own struggle?

I wanted to explore identity, faith, rebellion, mortality, Africa, power, youth, culture and the contradictions of becoming a man in this continent. There’s a lot of my younger self in the album, but there’s also the voice of somebody who has lived long enough to understand that sometimes the greatest flex is self-awareness.

IBRAHYMN is a spiritual conversation disguised as a hip-hop record. It’s me talking to the unknown, talking to Africa, talking to the streets, talking to the younger generation and sometimes talking to myself.

There’s a real sense of movement across the album, sonically and geographically, with collaborators from Kenya and different parts of Africa. Was there a conscious intention to make IBRAHYMN feel like more than a Kenyan hip-hop record?

Absolutely. I love Kenya deeply, but I don’t believe my imagination should stop at the border. Africa is not a collection of separate markets to me. It’s one massive cultural organism with different accents, different rhythms, different histories but a shared heartbeat.

So IBRAHYMN was always supposed to travel. I wanted Nairobi to be the home base, but I wanted the music to have passports. You can hear Kenya in it, but you can also hear Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Johannesburg, Kampala even places that don’t have a physical coordinate in the music but exist in the spirit of it. Hip-hop taught me that the block could become the world. Now Africa has to understand that the continent can become the block.

You’ve brought artists like Nneka, Young Lunya and AraTheJay into this project. What are you hearing in African artists outside Kenya right now that excites you, and what makes you want to bring someone into your world creatively?

What excites me is that African artists are no longer waiting for somebody outside Africa to validate what we already know. There’s hunger. There’s experimentation. There’s identity. You have young artists who are taking traditional sounds, street language, electronic music, hip-hop, Afrobeats, alternative music and completely disrespecting the idea that they have to choose one box. That’s exciting to me.

When I bring somebody into my world, I’m not looking for somebody who sounds like me. I’m looking for somebody who has something I don’t have. I want friction. I want chemistry. I want somebody to walk into the room with a completely different DNA and somehow we create a third language together. That’s how culture grows, not through imitation, but through collision.

You’ve moved through very different musical worlds over the years. Do you see that as constant reinvention, or are you simply following wherever your curiosity takes you?

I think reinvention is what happens when you refuse to die creatively. I’ve never been interested in making the same album twice. Chocolate city  was one version of me. Jungle Fever was another. Lamu Nights was another. Refugeenius was another. IBRAHYMN is another chapter. But I don’t necessarily wake up saying, “Today I’m going to reinvent myself.” I follow curiosity.

If something makes me uncomfortable, I want to understand it. If a sound scares me, I want to touch it. If somebody tells me, “You can’t do that,” sometimes that’s exactly where I want to go. The only thing that has remained constant is that I refuse to let the audience know what I’m going to do next.

When you listen back to Namba Nane now, what do you hear in that younger Octopizzo that still exists in the artist you are today and what feels completely foreign?

I hear hunger. That kid was hungry for recognition, hungry for escape, hungry to prove that somebody from Kibera could stand on a stage and command the room. That hunger is still here. What has changed is what I’m hungry for.

Back then, I wanted the world to know my name. Today, I want the work to mean something after my name is no longer the headline. The younger Octopizzo was fighting to be seen. The man I am today is more interested in seeing. That’s probably the biggest difference.

How much of the music you make today is driven by who you are now, versus the younger version of yourself who had something to prove?

The younger version of me still sits in the studio sometimes. He’s still angry. Still ambitious. Still asking, “Are they going to respect us now?” But I don’t let him drive the car anymore.

Today I make music from a place of choice rather than desperation. When you’re young, you create because you need the world to acknowledge your existence. As you grow older, you start creating because you have something to say. That’s a completely different energy. I don’t need every room to accept me anymore. I just need to remain honest when I enter it.‍

You’ve spent much of your career turning lived experience into music. Does storytelling become harder or easier when you have more life behind you to draw from?

It becomes harder, because the older you get, the more you understand the weight of the truth. When I was younger, I could tell a story and just bleed on the microphone. Now I understand that every story has people attached to it. Families. Children. Memories. Consequences. Sometimes the truth isn’t just yours to tell.

But at the same time, life gives you more layers. When you’re twenty, heartbreak is heartbreak. At forty, you understand that heartbreak can be about your father, your family members, your children, your country, your younger self, the person you became, or the person you never got to become. So the stories become deeper. You stop just describing what happened.

You start asking why it happened, what it changed, who it made you, and what you’re supposed to do with the scars. That’s where storytelling becomes almost spiritual.

You’ve watched several generations of Kenyan artists come through. What does this generation understand about the industry that yours had to learn the hard way and what do younger artists sometimes underestimate?

This generation understands ownership of attention better than we did. They understand social media. They understand personal branding. They understand that you don’t necessarily need a gatekeeper to reach an audience anymore. We came up knocking on doors. They can build their own door. But sometimes they underestimate the difference between attention and legacy. Going viral is not a career. A million views can happen overnight. Building something that still matters ten years later is a different game.

The algorithm can introduce you to the world, but it cannot give you discipline. You still have to develop the craft. You still have to understand contracts. You still have to protect your publishing. You still have to know your value. You have to learn how to survive when the cameras disappear. The streets can make you famous. But longevity requires structure.

Kenyan artists are increasingly collaborating across the continent. Do you think we’re beginning to understand the size of the African market, or are there still ways Kenyan music could think bigger?

I think we’re beginning to understand it, but we’re still standing at the entrance of the building. Africa is massive. The mistake is thinking that success means becoming popular in Kenya and then hoping somebody in Nigeria, South Africa or Ghana notices you.

We need to think continentally from the beginning. Why can’t a Kenyan artist build an audience in Dakar? Why can’t a producer from Kibera be making records for artists in Lagos? Why can’t Nairobi become a major export hub for African culture? We need stronger infrastructure around distribution, publishing, touring, festivals, licensing and intellectual property. Because the talent is not the problem. The talent has never been the problem. The question is whether we can build the systems around the talent that allow African creativity to circulate like African music already does in our streets.

Your story is inseparable from Kibera, but your career has taken you far beyond it. How has your relationship with home changed as your world has expanded?

Kibera stopped being just a place a long time ago. It became a language. I can travel to Copenhagen, Lagos, Paris, Accra, Berlin or New York, and somehow I still carry that dusty road from Mashimoni with me. The older I get, the more I understand that home isn’t necessarily where you sleep. Sometimes home is the lens through which you see the world. Kibera taught me observation. It taught me resilience. It taught me how to find beauty in places where people only see struggle. And the further I travel, the more I appreciate what it gave me. I used to want to escape Kibera. Now I realize I was supposed to expand Kibera into the world.

Your work through the Octopizzo Foundation has become an important part of your story beyond music. At what point did being an artist start feeling like more than making music?

When you come from a place where you’ve personally seen the problems, it’s difficult to just become successful and pretend you don’t see them anymore. Music gave me a microphone. But eventually I realized a microphone can describe a problem without necessarily changing it. So I started asking myself: What can I actually build? That’s where the Foundation became important. Whether we’re working around education, water, food security, creative opportunities, refugees or young people, the philosophy is simple: dignity first. I don’t believe in saving people.

I believe in creating conditions where people can save themselves. Because I know what it feels like to have somebody look at you and see your circumstances before they see your potential. I want the young person growing up in Kibera to understand that their postcode is not a prophecy.

After all these years, what do you still feel you haven’t figured out creatively? And when you eventually look back at the full Octopizzo catalogue and everything you’ve built around it, what do you hope people understand?

I haven’t figured out how to make the perfect record. And I hope I never do. Because the moment you think you’ve figured everything out, curiosity dies. I’m still trying to understand how far I can stretch hip-hop. How African can it become? How experimental can it become? How much truth can a song hold before it becomes uncomfortable?

And when people eventually look back at this catalogue, I don’t want them to see a guy who made a lot of music. I want them to see a document of a time. A kid from Kibera growing into a man while Kenya was changing around him. I want them to hear Nairobi before it became whatever Nairobi becomes tomorrow. I want them to hear the youth, the anger, the laughter, the politics, the love, the poverty, the ambition, the contradictions, the African dream. 

Because ultimately, that’s what I’ve been doing all these years. Documenting the journey. Not just my journey. Ours. And if, years from now, somebody plays an Octopizzo record and says, “This is what it felt like to be young, African and alive in that era,” then I think I did what I came here to do.

Cover : Courtesy of Octopizzo

“I’m the destroyer of Afrobeats,” a soft chuckle let out as he introduced himself. Those familiar with Mr Eazi’s TikTok content may recognise the reference. His voice on the call had the same quality as his music: laid-back but deliberate, with a delivery that made me want to hear what came next. 

For the emPawa Africa honcho and Latin Grammy-nominee, this year has been a rain of duets. After dropping his 9-tracker extended play with Ghanaian singer King Promise, See What We’ve Done, earlier in the year, he rounds off summer with another “Lagos-to-Accra” collaboration. Tag-teaming MOLIY on Comfort, he’s back in the spotlight for his charming, easy-going, hypnotic rhythms. 

 “As soon as we made Comfort, I’m like, yeah, I feel like this is what we should put out,” he said, revealing that the song was not originally planned as his next single.

Before the interview began, this writer asked him  how many videos he had made that day to promote Comfort. “You don’t count when you’re having fun. It’s when you’re working that you count,” he said. 

His answer offered a glimpse into how he approaches creative work. He’s easily hyperfixated, when he loves something. It absorbs him, and keeping track of the hours or the output typically seems beside the point. 

The 2026 run of releases did not begin with a formal strategy. It grew out of the momentum of See What We’ve Done, and 2025’s Maison Rouge — an EP he described as a love letter to his Banku Music roots. Recorded around the same period as 2023’s The Evil Genius, Maison Rouge was eventually given a life of its own. 

His ongoing creative relationship with his US based dancehall producer, Dre Skull , who has helped keep the releases coming. Their history stretches back to records like 2019’s Supernova, 2021’s Sekkle & Bop featuring Popcaan, 2025’s Dance Pon Me and Lambo, featuring Vybz Kartel, from this year. “A big shout out to Dre Skull, who essentially got me recording all these records,” Mr Eazi boomed. He claims that the years of friendship and collaboration across the Atlantic have given them a working relationship that continues to produce new music. He also confirmed that more records are on the way.

‍Everlasting Banku 

Banku Music — a term Mr Eazi coined to describe the intersection of Nigerian and Ghanaian sounds — remains central to how he understands his music, even as the industry has adopted other terms for similar sounds. “I think it’s what everybody’s calling Afro-fusion now,” he said. 

The name Banku derives from the popular Ghanaian dish made from fermented corn and cassava dough. Mr Eazi adopted the name as a metaphor for his music’s mixture of influences and its characteristically relaxed atmosphere.  

He pointed to Bankulize as a clear example of what Banku Music contains: Ghanaian and Nigerian influences alongside dancehall and R&B, all coming together without any single element dominating the record. 

The same cross-border approach runs through his catalogue. Life is Eazi, Vol 1 - Accra to Lagos brought together artists from different scenes, while Life is Eazi, Vol 2 - Lagos to London extended that musical geography further. For Mr Eazi, the choice of collaborator begins with the song itself, followed by the sound and story he wants to build around it. “Two things inform my collaborations. One is the song itself, and then the second is the sonic direction or story I’m trying to tell you.”

Across his career, Mr Eazi’s work — from music, to sports — has thrived as a unifier. His sound captures the West African spirit shared by two borders. His events and, recently, music collaborations have only deepened that effect. A bridge of sorts, his Banku riddims and pan-African artistry have earned him that status as a connector. As a movement.  

Everlasting Mogul 

Mr Eazi’s emPawa Africa, the music ecosystem built to address the gaps he encountered as an emerging artist, began with a specific problem. “It was very hard to even get funding for African music,” he said. “There were not a lot of companies that were taking Afrobeats as priority.”

The landscape has changed significantly since 2018, with more labels entering the market, increased investment and mergers and acquisitions reshaping the industry. Yet some of the challenges that prompted him to start emPawa remain. Others have taken new forms. “There’s always gonna be a gap for information - just artists knowing what is going on,” he said. 

He also emphasized that while access to funding remains an issue, particularly for artists who lack established industry connections and financial resources, mentorship still remains vital to building sustainable careers. 

For him, supporting artists means helping them understand how the industry works and giving them the practical knowledge to navigate it, from getting started to sustaining their careers.

Building businesses across music, technology, entertainment and investment has not changed how Mr Eazi approaches making music. He does not treat them as separate ways of working. “I approach everything the same way, which is by how I feel,” he said. 

To him, commercial performance still matters. Every release involves people’s time and investment, and he is clear that he works towards scale. But the biggest reward comes from seeing an idea through to completion. For him, bringing a song from an idea into existence remains worthwhile in itself, regardless of how far it goes commercially. “Seeing it come to life is the biggest reward.”

Mr Eazi’s TikTok has become another expression of that philosophy. From speculation about his grey hair to his playful responses to online conversations, his engagement with what people say about him carries a sense of humour that seems consistent with how he talks about creativity. “I like having fun,” he said. “Fun is really important to life.” If something feels like it can be done with fun behind it, he will most likely do it.

The same instinct influenced his decision to release Comfort ahead of a project that was already lined up. When asked what comes next, he said he wants to have more fun with the music and continue exploring what TikTok can do. For Mr Eazi, the next step is still an “opportunity to experiment,” follow his instincts and see where they lead.

Credit:Mr Eazi

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Thirteen years after launching her first fashion brand, Taller Than Your Average — a label that exclusively caters to tall women — fashion entrepreneur and cultural strategist, Irene Agbontaen, is returning with TTYA Lab, the second chapter in her fashion career evolution. Launched last month during London Fashion Week, TTYA Lab is the label’s official wardrobe system. Together, Agbontaen’s devotion towards an overlooked community continues to manifest with strong ambition. 

TTYA's evolution reflects how far things have come since those early days in the summer of 2013. After more than a decade across fashion, music and entertainment, she returns with a deeper understanding of consumer behaviour, cultural relevance and what it takes to build lasting impact. 

TTYA Lab offers a considered approach to getting dressed, built around versatile foundations, thoughtful design and pieces that work together with the wardrobes women already own.

As a founder, Irene has created space for conversations around creative ambition, representation and the business of culture, drawing on her own experiences and the knowledge of the people around her. From working with music’s most influential artists, including Wizkid, Burna Boy and Central Cee, to building partnerships that recognise cultural value, her career has focused on who gets seen, who gets heard and who benefits. That philosophy informs TTYA Lab, where representation means creating something people can genuinely participate in and feel ownership of.

As TTYA Lab kickstarts its next phase, this writer spoke with Agbontaen for Deeds about the lessons that shaped TTYA's broader return, the importance of building with a community rather than simply marketing to one, and what it means to recognise your own value while making space for others. The mission remains familiar, but the ambition has evolved: TTYA Lab is not an attempt to recreate the past, but a vision for the future of fashion for tall women.

Seneo for Deeds: TTYA has existed for 13 years, and now you've chosen to relaunch it as TTYA Lab. Why did you feel now was the time to bring it back in this new chapter?

TTYA Lab is a wardrobe system for tall women. It comes from my personal experience as a 5’11 woman and my understanding that, historically, fashion hasn't really spoken to women like me. So, I wanted to solve a problem through personal experience, and with TTY Lab, I wanted to move beyond what we can't and into what we can. Tall women are fashion consumers, too. We care about design, proportion, fabrication, and how our wardrobes work for us, just like everybody else.​

The rebrand has evolved a lot. I launched TTYA over 10 years ago, and the first chapter taught me so much about consumers, products and what the market was missing. TTYA is coming back to the same problem with more experience. I’ve spent the last couple of years working at the intersection of fashion, music, culture and brand strategy, and I understand business, consumer and cultural behaviour better now. The value of cultural currency feels different now, and that shapes this chapter.

What has changed in how you have approached things this time around?

I have found that the problem hasn’t really disappeared. A lot has shifted during our break, in that consumers have moved faster than the industry. Women are much more sophisticated in how they build their wardrobes now, and the climate and economy matter too. We want our wardrobes to work smarter, not just spend, spend, spend. I’m a streetwear kid, so you’ll see me wearing a combination of things. People are more conscious about dressing smarter; it’s about rotating the pieces I already have for work, travel, dinner, and everyday wear.

For tall women, there’s still an extra layer of compromise when it comes to finding clothes that work for us. I have to get a men’s double XL shirt and wear it oversized and baggy. We’ve found ways to make it cool, but we’re still compromising. We can’t shop with our friends the way we’re used to without thinking: can I get that length, will the sleeve fit, can I find a shoe in my size? I wanted to take some of that friction away without making the product feel like specialist clothing.

Our whole system is built around rotation, and you’ll see tailoring, jersey, outerwear, and footwear. It’s designed to speak to each other and slot into your existing wardrobe, so you can take one piece and immediately see three or four different ways it can live in your wardrobe.

You've built a career not just in fashion, but across entertainment, music, and ultimately a space that encompasses culture. So what does community and culture mean to you in relation to TTYA?

For me, working at the intersection of fashion and culture, I’m always asking the same question: how do you build something with genuine cultural relevance rather than marketing it to people? You’ll see this in most of the successful campaigns I’ve done, whether it was doing a pop for Wizkid in New York or creating one of the groundbreaking deals with Burna Boy. We’ve always focused on the consumer first and the cultural intersection, rather than being transactional and KPI-based. How do we create stories? How do we engage that artist’s existing community?

That’s how I thought about TTYA: as a community of girls who have been underrepresented. Instead of saying, "I’m going to work with this high-profile talent," we wanted to work with our community. We put out a casting call on Instagram. We didn’t have strict criteria; we wanted girls who would actually engage with the brand and wear the clothes.

Working across music has been particularly interesting because artists are some of the most powerful brand builders in the world. You quickly learn about storytelling, community identity and creating worlds that people want to participate in. We’ve been selective in defining the TTYA world and why people would want to be interested in it.

As the TTYA community has expanded beyond just clothing, did you see that from the beginning when you started the brand?

Community has always been essential to TTYA. I’m a customer too, so I know my experience isn’t every tall woman’s experience, and for this next chapter, I wanted to make sure we were engaging with people who were actually part of the community. We did a focus group and had over 30 women come into the building and share their real experiences. We listened to their frustrations and looked at their wardrobes and how they were failing them. I’m not just making stuff that I like. I’m making stuff for the consumers, the people who are going to buy the product.

I didn’t want to build a brand that talks at women. I didn’t want to tell you, “This is what you need” or “This is what you should buy.” I wanted to build something that sat alongside them, and I wanted them to feel part of the story and the narrative. That’s why we use the word Lab, because there’s an element of testing. We’re learning. We’re evolving. I’m not going to get everything right, and that’s why I’ve always told the community, I’m not going to make everything at once. Let me start with the foundation pieces, and then we can layer, and we can go on from there.

Everything we’ve evolved isn’t just about fashion. It’s about what it means to be Taller Than Your Average, to be a pioneer in your field, and to care about your community. I started TTYA Talks because, working in a creative industry, I never saw Black women who looked like me where I could really say, “Sis, I’ve got this opportunity. How much shall I be getting? How much shall I charge them? How much should my invoice be?” TTYA Talks started as a safe space for me to speak with peers doing amazing things in this industry, whether it was Vanessa Kingori, the first Black publisher at Condé Nast, or FKA Twigs, who talked about the business of music. We were really keen on how I use my network to show people what we didn’t have.

I’ve learned a lot from the very beginning that, actually, what is your value? What are you bringing to the table, and how do you make sure a partnership works in both sides' best interests? It’s not you bringing your network and making the project amazing while the other person gets all the cultural capital and your brand hasn’t grown. You haven’t got any equity. You’re not gaining any market share. So for me, TTYA: you don’t have to be tall to embody what TTYA means; it’s a mindset. It’s taller than your average in your mindset as well.

Being Nigerian, my parents coming to the UK taught me a lot. It's like we got hustle. Like nothing was given to us. We had to hustle for what we wanted. So TTYA stands for more than just a product. It's actually about a mindset as well.

Going through the podcast talks was almost my way to express and share what I'm learning. This is where my peers are, and these are the people that you could learn from. And in our community, it's always important to share information, and that's where they always get us. We don't talk enough. Everybody wants to say, "Let me keep it here,” or "Let me not, let me not say.” And we've been engineered not to talk about money, and we need to be more about money. Like, says How much pay you for that deal? Let me make sure that when I'm doing mine, it's matching.

You've moved through so many different spaces, from fashion and nightlife to music and building TTYA. How have those experiences shaped how you see your own value, and how important it is to create space for others?

My career hasn't been linear. I've worked across fashion, music, and talent. But when I look back, there's been a very clear thread through all of it. I'm interested in people. I'm interested in culture. I'm interested in creating opportunities where I can. I'm always a firm believer in bringing everyone in and sharing experiences.​​

I've spent a lot of my career advocating for other people's values. TTYA has taught me to advocate for that same confidence in myself. When I look at my career, what connects everything is understanding cultural value. That doesn't go away whether it's fashion, music, culture, or working with this artist or pouring myself into it. As long as your pillars and your values are really clear, there's something special about not feeling like you have to be boxed in.

My career is really interesting. I've never been like, " Oh, I'm only doing this, or I'm only doing this. Naturally, it's been like a progression domino effect. If I didn't work in club life, I wouldn't understand the power of community. If I didn't work the door of a nightclub, I wouldn't understand what it feels like to belong, to be seen, to create a space where people come to have a good time, network, and genuinely love music. Like, working with talent, I wouldn't understand the value, the real importance of how you actually convert that community into commerce, or how you actually genuinely stand on business.

For me, it's always been seeing the value in things that might get overlooked. You know, and advocate for that value. And that's whether that's like making sure that the artists that I work for are getting paid as much as their counterparts, or whether that's for me, building something that I know represents women who should be in a conversation. Why shouldn't tall women be included in a fashion conversation? Again, for me, it's like, what does that look like, and why are we continuously overlooked, and how do we advocate for that? And there's a common denominator there across the different kinds of verticals that I span.

As somebody who has been working in the cultural landscape for a while. Is there a difference between representing a culture and actually building within that culture? Where do you draw that distinction?

The difference between representing culture and actually building culture is that representation is about being visible within something that already exists. When you're building, it's about creating that space. So almost a representation happens within the building. When you're building something, you're creating the visual language, you're creating the community, and giving people something that they can participate in and ultimately feel ownership of.  It's been a big evolution in my career. I've spent years working alongside talent from Wizkid, Burna Boy, and Central Cee, who didn't simply represent culture. They actively shaped what culture became; they influence how people dress, how people speak, how people discover music, how global brands understand their audience-like they're like pioneers in that sense.

When you talk about representation, you're working within that rulebook once it's been created, and that taught me a lot: culture isn't something you can manufacture through marketing campaigns. You have to build the conditions for your community to form around an idea. So even when we look at Gabriel Moses shooting our campaign, that was very important. People may see it and think, "Gabriel Moses- how does he fit with TTYA?”  They're not going to be thinking These are two South Londoners. They're not going to be thinking, "These are two South Londoners." I'm Nigerian as well, and we have so many deep-rooted cultural similarities.

Choosing Gabriel for the campaign was really intentional. For me, Gabriel is one of the most important image makers of this generation, and that choice also felt deeply personal and culturally connected. There's a shared understanding, ambition, and experience of growing up within those different cultural worlds we know as hustle. Gabriel's work has an incredible ability to make people feel monumental, and that's what I wanted for tall girls. This is your time to be seen. His work has beauty, strength, and emotion, and I wanted the TTYA woman to feel that same consideration. You are beautiful, you are strong. We thought about you with intention.

With everything you've learned and gone through, how do youe you feel at this point in your career?

It's been really emotional. If I'm 100% honest, when you've been building something for over a decade, you're not the same person who started it. When I first started TTYA, I was much younger, and I relied heavily on my instincts and lived experience. I knew there was a problem because I was the consumer, but over these 13 years, I've grown as a woman. I've grown as a founder, as an executive. I've travelled the world. I've had so many different experiences, and I've worked across music, fashion, talent, culture. I've built TTYA Talks. I've sat in rooms with some of the most incredible global artists, and I never imagined being there.

I've seen the community. I'm kind of more I’m really homing in on my niche. I've seen the demand. I've lived through the problem, and now I think I've got all of the experience that I can to bring it kind of back again. And I think that's what makes TTY Lab feel different. It's not me trying to recreate something I did 13 years ago. It's taking everything that I've learned within that time and saying, "What did this? What does this idea deserve to become now?”

How do you know when it's time to evolve, and where you are right now and everything that you're building? What are you looking forward to in the next evolution and the next chapter?

You know it's time to evolve when the version of you that created something is no longer the same version of you that's leading it. At some point, you have to be honest enough with yourself to recognise that your vision has expanded beyond you, and if I'm going to be honest, TTYA has expanded beyond me. Like, I couldn't even maintain it. I hated working on the production side. I hated speaking to factories in the Far East at the early hours of the morning, or always being sent to the back of the production line because they had bigger, better brands. So I was always moved to the back, and I didn't enjoy the production.

Even now, with this new evolution of TTYA, I've taken on a manufacturing partner. ASOS are my manufacturing partner. I keep all my brand IP; I keep all my equity. They're coming on the back to, you know, make and design all the work with me on designing all the product. So even that deal within itself, I wouldn't have been able to do that kind of deal 13 years ago. It's experience and everything that I've seen over the years that's allowed me to be like, actually, this is how I know my business can scale. You have the infrastructure to scale. You can come on, and you can help me, you know, have global distribution channels, and you can help me manufacture all of this product to the scale that I need it to be without that huge collateral investment, you know.

The original TTYA was right for who I was at the time, but TTYA Lab reflects the woman, the founder, and the cultural strategist I am today. And the purpose hasn't really changed. Those tall women were there 13 years ago; they're here now. I'm just still advocating for that tall woman. But what has changed is the scale of my ambition. My understanding of the consumer and the tools that I now have to build what's around TTYA- that's the next chapter that I'm excited about walking into.

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CULTUR FM, a global cultural platform rooted in music, community and storytelling, will make its Los Angeles debut from October 14, 2026 to October 17, 2026. The four-day programme brings together private DJ recording sessions and a ticketed main event, creating space for music lovers, creatives and tastemakers to connect through African
sounds and shared cultural experiences.

The programme opens on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, with an exclusive collaboration with Apple Music at its Los Angeles studio. The event highlights CULTUR FM’s inclusion in the Apple Music’s mix programme, creating a potential pathway for the sounds captured during the activation to reach listeners even further and beyond the room.

The studio moment reflects a wider ambition: to connect the immediacy of live music with lasting cultural storytelling. A DJ set is more than a sequence of songs. It carries influences, introduces discoveries and creates connections between places and people. Recording those moments allows the platform to champion the selectors behind the
sound while building a cultural story that continues beyond a single gathering.

On Thursday, October 15, 2026, and Friday, October 16, 2026, the programme continues with two intimate private DJ tapings. These sessions bring invited guests closer to the music and the people shaping it, creating space for discovery, conversation and shared experience. Each taping offers a distinct perspective within the wider CULTUR FM Los Angeles story.

Everything builds to Saturday, October 17, 2026, when The Vermont Hollywood hosts the headline CULTUR FM Los Angeles event. From 10PM until 2AM, ROZAY, FAAJI, LAVISH and BLAQ PAGES, some of the biggest names in LA take over the decks, bringing their individual sounds together for a night centred on musical discovery, expression and
collective energy.

Delivered in partnership with Amplify Africa, the Los Angeles activation forms part of CULTUR FM’s continued expansion across North America. Its ambition is not simply to arrive in a new city, but to build meaningful relationships with the artists, creatives and communities shaping its cultural landscape. In LA, that means creating a meeting point
between the city’s African-diaspora community and CULTUR FM’s wider international network.

From the intimacy of the studio to the shared energy of the dancefloor, these four days are connected by one purpose: to make sound a starting point for community, and to leave behind more than the memory of a night.

Tickets for CULTUR FM Los Angeles are on sale now [Click Here].

“The sound of this album is just an elevation”, Nigerian troubadour FOLA says of 9, his widely anticipated sophomore album.  

After a year of personal transformation following his debut album, catharsis, FOLA, born Afolarin Odunlami, is ready to make a seismic impact with his bold new album, 9. 

Featuring collaborations with Bella Shmurda, Ayra Starr, BNXN and Zlatan, the project captures him embracing new possibilities without losing sight of the qualities that brought him here. It is also a fearless leap into uncharted musical territory.

In this conversation, he reflects on making 9, the lore behind honing his sound, as well as his determination to take his music to audiences worldwide. He speaks of growth — which is evident as you listen through to the album — and he takes us through his grandest ambition, which remains rooted in making music that people can return to years from now.  

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What led to this album? 

Initially, I didn't want to drop an album. I really like making music. I'm always making music. I have a lot of songs, so one day I sat down and thought, why am I just putting these songs together? Why can't I put a body of work together? I was in London one day and told my manager, I think we need to put out an album. So we actually drew out the plan and started working in that direction. We just did a couple of songs, and we joined it with what we had before, with the same storyline, same sort of music, same kind of sequence, and we put it out.

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How did you arrive at your signature sound? 

It's still me doing me at the end of the day. I just hopped on the beats, and I still wanted to sound like me. Obviously, that's not the regular FOLA. It's a little bit different. It's just showing people that, yeah, you can do this as well. The new set of songs encapsulates my new experience. After my last album, I've travelled around the world and had new experiences. So the sound of this album is just an elevation.

The album features a few collaborations, including Bella Shmurda, Ayra Starr, BNXN, and Zlatan. Tell us about your experience working with them. 

You can hear all the artists mentioned on the songs. Even before putting them on the song, I could hear them. Anytime I finish making a song, if I want to put someone on the song, I always think about it, and I'll be like, who fits this? Who can do this? And I reached out. Bella Shmueda, big shout-out to him; he doesn't stress me at all. BNXN, that's my brother, my friend. We have tons of songs together, so we picked one of the best ones for the album. Ayra Starr. I just finished "Treat U Right," before I featured Ayra, and I thought, you know, I needed a female magician on this one, so I put Ayra Starr on it.

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Did the focus for the album ever shift?

I always have my direction; I always know where I'm going. So I keep adding the right thing to the song, elevating the song. Nothing changes, not the storyline, not the beats. You keep adding to it. I always say this: a record is never done until you decide to leave it alone. You know, so like I'll pull my all in it, and when I see that this is enough, I like to get it done.

When did you know that it was finished?

I've been working on this album for almost a year and a half; you know I'm a perfectionist. Perfectionism is even tiring of me changing and adding things. There's a song titled 2 AM in Toronto. That was the song I added. One day in Toronto, I was listening to the song, and it gave me mad goosebumps, so I called the label and said I wanted to add it. I knew this was the one, and after that, I knew it was done.

How did making this album influence you as a person?

It's widening my horizons; how I think, the people, the food, the cultures, everything has influenced me. It's just a new piece of life. The world is so beautiful; you keep on getting to know things and learning new things. You know, and you can even hear it in the music. When you sit down and hear this album, you will know what I’m talking about. Such beautiful songs, a couple of beautiful songs. There are some things you're going to love. Like I'm happy for where I'm coming from. I'm happy with where I am right now, and I'm happy with where I'm going, too.

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Is there a particular message you want people to get from the music when they hear it?

I always try to send the message of whatever I'm going through in my songs because I want my music to be relatable; I want you to listen to my songs when you're 60. When you're seventy, I want you to put my song on for your grandchildren. I want you to tell them that this is what we were listening to when we were young, you know, that’s how much originality I put into my music. I want you to feel love, feel pain. I want you to feel like there is hope for something. I want you to be able to connect to this on a very different level.

Was there anything, as you were growing up and before you became an artist, like what do you think was the thing that drew you to music?

I won't say I came from a family of musicians, but I really loved music growing up. So it wasn't so hard for me. I knew what I wanted from the beginning. I started off listening to music, obviously, and got to a point where I just thought, you know what, these are the kind of songs I want to start making. This is how I want to make my own songs. This is music I want to make.

How has your attitude or relationship with music changed over the years now that you're in this position??

I'm more serious now. Shit is getting real. I can see what my music is doing for me. Like it's just like the things you've been wanting to do, and it's happening in front of your eyes, and it just makes me, it just makes me look more, you know. Like it just makes me want to do more.

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What are you excited for in terms of not even just the album, but just in general, like the next chapter and the next phase of your journey?

I really want it all. I want the album to reach larger audiences. You know, I want to perform songs on this song all over the world. I want to do the impossible, man. There are a lot of things I want to achieve. I have no limits.

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Beauty Hut Africa is a beauty retailer. Founded by Subuola Oyeleye in Lagos in 2023, the company has since built an ecosystem around selling skincare, makeup, fragrance and wellness products. This week, the company announced that Made By Mitchell, the British makeup brand founded by beauty creator Mitchell Halliday, is launching in Nigeria through a direct partnership with Beauty Hut Africa.

For Nigerian beauty consumers who have spent years discovering Mitchell’s colourful makeup tutorials, Blursh products and other launches online, the announcement brings a brand that has largely existed through screens into the physical retail experience. It is also the latest development in a campaign Beauty Hut has been running for the past two years. The company has taken influencers to Lakowe Lakes, organised a Mother’s Day wellness retreat at Isimi Lagos, partnered with brands outside traditional beauty spaces, organised fitness and sporting experiences, and collaborated with names in food, fashion and music. Its first brand trip in 2025 brought creators and personalities together for a weekend of golf, yoga, fishing and dinners, with products from brands on Beauty Hut’s platform woven throughout the experience.

None of these things changes what Beauty Hut sells, but they show what selling beauty can look like beyond the shelf. It happens in salons and bathrooms, in makeup chairs before weddings, in WhatsApp groups where someone is asking whether a particular serum is worth buying, and on TikTok where a product can go from unfamiliar to impossible to ignore within a few days. The Nigerian beauty consumer is already part of a much larger culture around products, routines, appearance and self-expression. What Beauty Hut has done is give some of that culture a physical and commercial space to gather. Beauty Hut’s reach extends beyond its stores, with the retailer also available on delivery platforms like Chowdeck and Glovo, bringing beauty products into the same everyday ordering habits that have made food, groceries and other essentials increasingly accessible on demand. At the same time, its physical presence has expanded from its Lekki store to Ikeja and, most recently, Abuja, giving the retailer a growing footprint beyond Lagos. 

The company’s first brand trip in February 2025 brought together influencers and personalities for a weekend where beauty products existed alongside leisure, fashion, wellness and hospitality. Guests found products from brands including Uncover and Topicals in their rooms, while the wider trip involved partnerships with JBottoms, Cape & Coco and others. The products were still part of the experience, but they were no longer the whole experience.

Beauty retail has traditionally been built around a simple transaction: you find a product, buy it and leave. Beauty Hut’s activities suggest a different understanding of how people relate to beauty brands now, especially in a market where discovery is heavily driven by social media and communities. A product can be part of a weekend away. It can sit inside a wellness experience. It can appear at a run club, a padel match or a food collaboration. It can become part of the way a group of young women spend a Saturday together.

Beauty Hut’s Mother’s Day retreat at Isimi Lagos pushed this even further. The 2026 experience brought mothers, daughters, sisters and friends together for a weekend of massages, scalp treatments, food, workouts, movie night and beauty products. The products were present throughout the experience, but the central proposition was connection. This is where beauty begins to resemble the way other parts of Nigerian popular culture have been operating.

Music has long understood the value of creating a world around the thing being sold. A concert is not simply a place to hear an artist perform. Fashion has similarly moved beyond clothing itself, with brands building events, communities and identities around what people wear. Food brands have understood the same thing through pop-ups, collaborations and social experiences. Beauty is increasingly playing in that space too.

Beauty Hut has appeared in places that do not immediately look like traditional beauty retail. Its partnerships and activities have included collaborations with food, fashion, fitness and entertainment brands, while campaigns such as Hut Body Summer have placed beauty within a wider lifestyle conversation. The campaign brought together Beauty Hut, 818 Tequila and Mavin Records around Ayra Starr’s “Hot Body”, with an activation designed to bring music, beauty and social experiences into the same space. Its collaboration with Severe Nature produced a Beauty Hut-branded jersey, while its partnership with RaRa Ramen resulted in the limited-edition Hut Mama Bowl. The Hut Girl Walk with Eko Runner Club is another example. The Hut Girls Padel experience with The Padel Club Lagos is another. The point of these events is not simply that beauty products are being displayed in different locations. It is that beauty consumers are being treated as a community with interests that extend beyond skincare and makeup.

Building a community around beauty is becoming increasingly important as the industry becomes more social. A person might discover a product because a creator reviewed it on TikTok, decide to buy it because a friend recommended it, attend an event where the brand is present and then post about the experience themselves. The purchase does not end the relationship with the brand. In some cases, the experience around the purchase becomes part of why the brand remains relevant.

Beauty Hut’s own retail proposition reflects this wider ambition. Its website describes the company as “Africa’s Ultimate Beauty Destination,” with a catalogue spanning international and African beauty brands. The brands Beauty Hut brings into the Nigerian market make this positioning even more interesting. The company has an exclusive partnership with Topicals for the brand’s launch into Africa, and its current catalogue includes Topicals alongside brands such as Danessa Myricks Beauty and FORVR Mood. Danessa Myricks officially launched in Nigeria through Beauty Hut in November 2025, with the retailer hosting an exclusive dinner in Lagos around the arrival. The relationship with these brands is part of Beauty Hut’s wider role in making international beauty products accessible to African consumers, while creating the local experiences that accompany their arrival.

Made By Mitchell is the latest example, but the significance is not only in the number of international brands Beauty Hut carries. It is also in the kind of access those brands represent. Nigerian consumers are increasingly familiar with products, ingredients, creators and brands before those brands have any physical presence in the country. Social media has collapsed some of the distance between Lagos and everywhere else. People see what is launching in London, New York or Los Angeles and immediately begin asking when they can get it here.

Access to global beauty brands is only one part of what has changed about Nigerian beauty consumption. Consumers also expect more from the brands bringing those products to them. Beauty retailers are therefore no longer only responding to demand. They are helping determine which parts of global beauty culture become locally accessible, visible and desirable.

Beauty Hut’s expansion into experiences makes that role even more pronounced. The company has also moved into initiatives that extend beyond selling products altogether. Its Women’s Grant, powered by Busha, awarded ₦6 million in equity-free funding across three women-led beauty businesses in 2026. Five founders pitched their businesses at the final event in Lagos, with Inveo Labs, Tulivu Fragrance and SavedSkin Cosmeceuticals taking the three winning places. Beauty now brings together products, consumers, creators, businesses and experiences within the same broader ecosystem. Beauty Hut’s grant programme shows that the ecosystem extends beyond the people buying beauty products to the people building businesses within the industry itself. It would be easy to describe this as Beauty Hut becoming a lifestyle brand, but that misses the more interesting point. Beauty Hut has not stopped being a retailer. Retail is still the foundation of the business. The more useful question is why a retailer needs to build so much around the act of shopping in the first place. Part of the answer is that beauty has become difficult to separate from identity and community. People do not only buy a particular lip product because they need something for their lips. They might buy it because they saw someone they follow use it, because it belongs to a brand they identify with, because they want to participate in a particular beauty conversation or because owning it gives them access to something they have been watching online. The physical store then becomes one part of a much larger relationship.

This is also why the Made By Mitchell announcement matters beyond the arrival of another international makeup brand. For years, Nigerian consumers have participated in global beauty culture largely through their phones. The products, creators and trends arrive on their feeds long before they arrive on local shelves. When a retailer brings one of those brands into the country, it is not simply solving a distribution problem. It is responding to a culture that already exists.

Beauty Hut’s significance is therefore less about any single retreat, collaboration or product launch. It is in the accumulation of these activities and what they reveal about where beauty sits in Nigerian culture now. A beauty retailer can host a wellness retreat. It can organise a run. It can put consumers around a padel court. It can collaborate with a restaurant, work with a fashion brand, bring in a global makeup label, build a campaign around an Afrobeats star and support women building businesses in the same industry. The shelf remains important, but it is no longer the whole story.

Beauty is becoming one of the places where Nigerian consumers meet, discover things, build communities and participate in culture. Beauty Hut is not creating that shift by itself, but its business offers a useful way to see it happening. As Made By Mitchell moves from Nigerian beauty consumers’ screens to their shopping baskets, the boundary between beauty retail and the culture built around it becomes harder to ignore.

Cover Credit: Subuola Oyeleye

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Nightlife has always had its own economy. Money changes hands behind the scenes, careers are built in packed rooms, and entire communities can form around a particular DJ, promoter, venue or party. For Ayinde Castro, understanding that economy has meant occupying nearly every side of it.

The Harvard Business School grad and former LinkedIn product professional first entered the events world as the founder of Elevate Social in 2022. What began in the Bay Area as a community for Black professionals and creatives grew into a multi-city events platform, eventually reaching 14 cities and more than 50,000 people. Castro also taught himself to DJ, moving from early sets at his own events to prime-time and closing slots. The closer he got to the machinery of nightlife, the more clearly he could see the gap between the cultural sophistication of the industry and the informal systems supporting it.

That observation led to Nocturne, a platform bringing contracts, invoices, payments and tax documentation into one place for DJs, promoters and venues. More than 100 DJs and promoters are now using the platform alongside four venues.

Castro continues to produce Elevate Social events and use Nocturne within them, keeping him close to the people and businesses he is building for. He is now taking that experience into the next phase of Nocturne, building at the intersection of nightlife, technology and culture.

In conversation with Deeds, Ayinde Castro talks NYC nightlife, the business behind the culture, and what he’s building with Nocturne. 

Stanley for Deeds: You were already DJing and throwing events before Nocturne. Take me back to that period – what were you seeing firsthand that eventually made you think, “There’s a business that needs to be built here”?

Yeah, so I started an events group called Elevate Social in 2022. I was living in the Bay Area, and the whole inception of it was that there wasn't really a community for people of color to meet up and fellowship. So I started doing brunch events for people who worked in tech and creative industries.

People at LinkedIn, Google, and other companies would come and realize, “Oh, there are other Black people in the Bay,” because San Francisco isn't very diverse. I wanted to build that community while also curating a space where people could hear music they were familiar with. We started with hip-hop, R&B, Afrobeats, amapiano and dancehall, and that really resonated with people.

We started doing it in different cities – San Francisco, New York, D.C., Boston, and eventually 14 cities to date. As I scaled Elevate Social, I started DJing myself. I wanted to curate the sound, so I taught myself how to DJ and started booking myself for the early sets, then eventually prime time and closing sets.

I got four years of experience DJing, and what I realized in the event industry was that, at times, you don't get paid on time, and the process of getting booked and getting paid is very antiquated. I'd text owners to reserve a date or send things over email. When it comes to taxes, you're just scrambling to figure out how much you got paid and where that money is. Sometimes you'd realize, “Oh, I didn't get paid for this gig.” So I wanted to come up with a company that could alleviate that back-end stress and allow people to focus more on creating music and creating events, as opposed to all the logistics that go behind it.

When you're actually putting on the party, you're probably not thinking about contracts and payment infrastructure – you're thinking about getting everyone in the room. What were some of those behind-the-scenes headaches that kept coming up for you?

For me, events are not a very professionalized industry in the sense that, for most things, you should have a contract, or you should get paid within a certain number of days. If I'm getting booked for an event, someone might just text me, and I'll put it in my calendar. Afterwards, I'll say, “Hey, can you send this payment?” There were many times when I'd be booked for a gig and it would be two weeks before I got paid, and I'd have to follow up via text.

Or I'll be booking events and a DJ cancels at the last minute. If I had a contract to support that, I could have avoided those headaches. I was seeing this time and time again. There's a great industry with a lot of growth, but the basics behind it in terms of what business should look like aren't enforced across the board.

And you've been in New York nightlife for a while now. When you look at the scene in NYC today compared with when you first got into it, what feels different to you?

I think when I first got into the New York scene, there were fewer themed parties and events. Now we're seeing a lot more people starting to DJ and throw their own events.

It's not that I think there's an oversaturation. I think the market is larger for DJs and event organizers. Before, there was a smaller group of people doing events. Now, for Black and brown people, it's dispersed across a lot more groups and a lot more DJs.

So there's a lot more variation. I've seen an influx of events. Before, there'd be one or two places that everyone would try to go to, but now there are multiple venues that people are interested in and multiple party groups. There's a lot more optionality now. And with all that extra optionality, there's more supply, and that supply needs the infrastructure layer to help support those events.

Do you think people are approaching nightlife differently now – whether that's how they discover events, build an audience, or even think about making a living from it?

Yeah. I think a lot of people get into DJing because they really appreciate the music, but there's a real business behind it. A lot of people are taking more gigs and charging for their services nowadays. Most people that I know who are in this space, one, love the music, but two, see it as a business.

I've seen a lot of people move from doing this part-time to doing it full-time. A lot of DJs I know have even moved to New York just to DJ full-time. So I'm seeing more and more people, as they get ramped up, taking it more seriously. Some DJs I know had a job before and then chose to pursue this full-time.

There's always been this really informal side to nightlife – texts, DMs, handshakes, spreadsheets, somebody saying they'll send the money tomorrow. Do you think that informality is part of what makes the industry work, or has it ultimately held people back?

I think it ultimately holds people back because there just needs to be increased trust within the event industry. Just because something's been the same way for many years doesn't mean that it should be. There are a lot of things that we get used to in life, but we all know that they're not right. So it's about who's going to be the person that changes the culture of what we deem acceptable versus not. 

That's what I've been trying to do – a paradigm shift in the way that we think about how business should be conducted. If you're a lot of people who are just used to getting paid when they get paid, it should instead be that you get paid within a certain number of days, or at least have an agreement about when that transaction is going to go through.

It's about changing the mindset, and that will just help people in general.

And I guess that's really where Nocturne comes in. How do you bring more structure into nightlife without taking away some of the spontaneity and relationships that make nightlife what it is?

For Nocturne, it's having a software layer to build more transparency and help centralize things. For example, if you're a DJ with Nocturne, you can quickly send the contract through the platform, have them sign it, and then, for payment afterwards, you can send one link where they can put in their invoice amount and you can pay them through that.

It's easier in terms of transparency and the ability to do things. The process to sign up takes a couple of seconds, and once you've done one event on the platform, you have your W-9 and all your finances tied to it. So if another promoter or DJ books you, all you have to do is click one button to share. It's pretty easy. You have a one-time setup.

I'm curious about what has changed for you, being on both sides of this. You came into this as a performer and saw the struggles people go through, and now you're creating a platform to streamline the process. Has seeing all of that from the other side changed how you think about the people actually working in nightlife?

Yeah. I think, in general, there's a lot of money going through the event industry and there's a lot more financial literacy. People increasingly want to move their hobby into a business. For example, creating an LLC allows you to write off some of your expenses.

There are also a lot of DJs who are famous who still use their Social Security number instead of setting up a business structure.

If you pay someone over $2,000 in the U.S. a year, you need to file a 1099-NEC because they're a contractor. Not a lot of people know about that. The platform helps you do the business stuff and formalize things because, as of now, not everyone is handling things properly. What I'm seeing is that people are becoming more financially literate and want to free up time to focus on their creative pursuits, as opposed to worrying about when they're getting paid and the logistics behind things.

Then you have this completely different experience from working in product at LinkedIn. What did you take from that world into Nocturne, and was there anything you had to unlearn when you started building for nightlife?

I wouldn't say it's something I had to unlearn. It's more so the different things that I learned from LinkedIn. I worked on the media team at LinkedIn and I also worked on the payments team, so I have a lot of experience with customer interviews, understanding what people need, building a product roadmap and building products.

I had an engineering internship, but I coded most of the website myself. I studied computer science in undergrad, so I'm bringing all the stuff I know about how to build, but also how to build the right products. That's what I learned from LinkedIn – how to understand payments and media, talk to people, understand their real pain points and then build a solution that fixes that.

I saw that Elevate Social is still doing events in New York – the recent one was August 29. How does that fit into your life now that you're also building Nocturne? Do the two sort of feed into each other?

Yeah, it complements each other. I'm still doing Elevate Social to curate events, and I think it helps as I'm building the company because I work with a lot of DJs and we use Nocturne for our events. Whenever we go to new markets, it's a way to get more people understanding the platform. If I do something in New Orleans, for example, everyone that I book for that event will at least understand what the product is because they're getting paid through it. 

So it's helped in terms of credibility. We're one of the big brands in the U.S., and it helps us do different events. We even have two events at the moment – one in Boston and another one. I've been able to still do that on the side, and it helps me understand the problem statement more because I work with all these different venues and DJs. I understand their problems and can build off of that.

You've talked about helping the people who drive culture build more sustainable businesses. When you say “sustainable,” what does that mean for a DJ or promoter? What changes for them?

What makes it sustainable for them is having systems in place to make sure that your business grows, that you're on track with your finances, and that your liability is minimized through the contracts we offer and payments. This is supposed to be for people to handle the operational side of things. For example, if you're a bigger act, sometimes you'd have a manager to help manage all this stuff. But if you don't come from the finance world or understand business and you want to focus on your art, this helps give you a framework and ways to manage all that stuff for you, as opposed to paying someone for help on that.

Speaking of finances, there's a bigger conversation around Black people creating so much of nightlife culture and being at the forefront of it, but not always having the ownership or economic power that comes with it. Is that something you're conscious of when you're building Nocturne?

Yeah, I think in general, with Nocturne, the goal is just to level the playing field in terms of what people can access and understand. In some places, depending on where you studied or what you've studied, you might be more attuned to understanding finances. If you didn't go to college, you might just not understand that side of things.

The whole point of Nocturne is to provide, across the board, a level of understanding of how you should be conducting business within nightlife and entertainment. We're giving people the tools so they can drive their own ships – making sure that they're not held liable through these contracts, making sure that they're paid on time, and making sure that they understand how to file taxes if you're paying those people.

It's about providing everyone with the toolbox universally. The whole goal is to democratize access through the software so that everyone can chart their own future. Now you have all the tools to succeed in handling your logistics in that way.

We've talked a lot about what you want Nocturne to change for people in nightlife, but what does success actually look like for the company itself? Are you at a point where you're thinking about scaling the business, bringing in investors or strategic partners, or is the focus still on proving the product and building the network?

I think we're past that. It's more so looking at investors now and also scaling more densely within New York and other markets. We have four venues on board, and we also have over 100 DJs and promoters on the platform. So it's more so about continuing to scale.

The goal, what success looks like for us, is to help change the narrative in the entertainment business around how you should conduct business.

That's the goal – having a paradigm shift and a mindset shift around how things should be done. If I can play a part in that change, then I'd be happy.

Cover Image by Migiani Piciato

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Jacob Elordi had a camera in hand. Tyler, the Creator and Solange Knowles were seated nearby, alongside Julianne Moore and other familiar faces from Bottega Veneta’s expanding cultural orbit. That crowded room in downtown Milan felt less like a traditional fashion crowd than a gathering of people who might belong to the same creative world, however differently they arrived there. Then the lights shifted.

For Spring/Summer 2027, Louise Trotter presented her third collection for the brand in Milan with an atmosphere built as carefully as the clothes themselves. 

British artist Mark Leckey provided the show’s soundtrack, moving across genres and eras from the 1960s through the 1990s, while German artist Florian Hecker created a site-specific sound installation, Scintillations 20, using suspended speakers and stainless-steel reflectors – while guests sat on sculptural, resin-coated cardboard stools by artist Illya Goldman Gubin, each topped with a small handcrafted leather flower. 

Even before the first model appeared, craft, art and sound had already become part of the presentation.

Lightness and movement sits at the centre of the collection’s central idea. Trotter described SS27 as an observation of the transition between seasons: the gradual shedding of winter’s protection as spring becomes summer. It is a simple premise, but one that gives the clothes an unusually clear progression. The collection begins with coats and outerwear before gradually revealing more skin, more texture and more air.

The opening looks still carry some of the architectural language that has defined Trotter’s Bottega so far. Coats arrive with padded shoulders and slightly exaggerated proportions, but hems are knotted or pulled aside, disrupting their formality. Tailoring is relaxed rather than rigid. A tiny intrecciato leather scarf is wrapped around a waist, turning Bottega’s most recognisable house code into something almost weightless.

And then, gradually, the collection opens up. Butter-yellow trousers meet lilac and striped shirts. Floral prints appear through draped fringe. White handmade lace, chunky openwork crochet and large-scale intrecciato take over as the show moves deeper into summer. A vivid red cotton dress is ruched at the waist and layered over a matching pleated skirt, while black dresses are sliced through with long strands of silk fringe. The effect is tactile without always feeling heavy – a distinction that matters when considering where Trotter has taken Bottega over the past year.

The intrecciato, Bottega Veneta’s signature woven-leather technique, remains central, but SS27 is less interested in simply showing off the house code than expanding what it can become. The weave appears across accessories, clothing and even smaller details, while raffia, crochet, lace and fringe give the collection a distinctly handmade quality. Bags remain important, including oversized woven and raffia shapes, but they feel integrated into the clothes rather than positioned as the inevitable stars of every look.

The shoes follow the same instinct toward ease, with artisanal-looking sandals and a new rubber ballet flat offering a softer alternative to the more eccentric footwear Trotter introduced in her debut, a shift perhaps most revealing about this collection.

Trotter’s Spring/Summer 2026 debut announced her arrival through abundance: oversized silhouettes, dramatic fringe, sculptural fiberglass, vivid colour and deliberately conspicuous leather. Her Fall/Winter 2026 collection doubled down, exploring Milan through the tension between brutalist architecture and sensuality, with enlarged shoulders, imposing coats and increasingly elaborate material treatments. Both collections established a designer fascinated by what Bottega’s artisans could make.

SS27 asks what happens when she stops trying to show all of it at once. The answer is a Bottega that feels less burdened by its own craftsmanship. The clothes move. Fringe swings behind the body. Crochet lets light through. Lace exposes what sits underneath. Even the heavier coats seem to be preparing to disappear. There is still plenty of technique – perhaps more than ever – but Trotter has become more selective about where she lets it speak.

The final word belonged to Kendall Jenner, who closed the 62-look presentation in a dramatic black, asymmetrically draped gown, carrying a small bag and wearing the collection’s artisanal sandals. Though it was Jenner’s return to the Bottega runway after first walking for the house in 2016, but this moment felt more sentimental as Elordi, her beau seated in the frow, watched her pass and was seen capturing the moment on camera.

After two seasons spent building volume, texture and authority, Louise Trotter’s third Bottega Veneta collection ends not with more, but with the suggestion of less. Less weight. More movement. And, finally, more room to breathe.

Cover Image Credit: Bottega Veneta

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Nairobi had another reason to step outside recently as Peaches & Cream made its debut at Ngong Racecourse, turning the grounds into an open-air celebration of soulful African sound.

Starting in the afternoon and stretching into the night, the inaugural event brought together music, food, lifestyle and community in a setting that felt deliberately removed from the usual nightclub circuit. The idea was simple: good music, good people and enough room to let the day unfold.

And the music delivered on that promise, with a lineup that brought together a strong mix of Kenya’s R&B, Afro-pop and alternative scene, with performances from Nikita Kering’, Xenia Manasseh, Njerae, Kethan, Bridget Blue, Ochiko and Watendawili. Each brought their own texture to a bill that felt distinctly Kenyan while still leaving room for a wider African sound.

From the smooth R&B tones they have become known to belting some of their fan-favourites, the stars with their own blend of alternative and Afro-fusion sounds together with the crowd took time to indulge in the moments. In the course of the evening, the energy shifted naturally from live performances into the dancefloor-ready sounds of DJs including Bune, IV, Darkfruit and Smolls.

Then came the international pull. South African singer Shekhinah and Afro-house heavyweight Sun-El Musician gave the debut its biggest continental moments, bringing the sounds of Southern Africa into a lineup otherwise rooted firmly in Nairobi. Their presence also underlined the event’s wider ambition: to create a space where Kenya’s emerging and established voices could sit comfortably alongside artists shaping African music beyond the country’s borders.

But Peaches & Cream was never just about standing in front of a stage. Set against the open grounds of Ngong Racecourse, the experience leaned into the social side of a typical Nairobi Saturday – people arriving with friends, dressing for the occasion, moving between performances, food and drinks, and making a day of it. The event’s format allowed the atmosphere to build gradually, moving from sunlit afternoon sets into the warmer, more energetic hours of the evening.

There were, naturally, a few unscripted moments along the way. During Watendawili’s performance, Charisma took an unexpected tumble on stage but continued singing from the floor before eventually getting back up and carrying on with the set. The moment quickly made its way online, becoming one of the lighter reminders that live music rarely goes exactly according to plan.

By the time night settled over the venue, Peaches & Cream had made its introduction: a music experience built less around a single headline moment and more around the feeling of spending an entire Saturday surrounded by sound, style and people.

For its first edition, it’s a fitting celebration of Kenya’s increasingly diverse musical landscape – soulful, social and very much in its own lane – and one can only hope this is the beginning of many more editions to come. 

COVER CREDIT: kibi.chii

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In a modern media landscape often saturated with monolithic and superficial depictions of Black culture, Netflix’s new A Different World sequel series arrives as a breath of fresh air. Executive produced by legendary director Debbie Allen and created by Felicia Pride, the 10-episode first season delivers a multidimensional, deeply respectful, and vibrant portrait of Black life.

For decades, television has too often defaulted to reductive tropes, painting Black men and women with narrow, negative brushes lacking depth, intellect, or meaningful dialogue. The A Different World sequel counters this narrative directly. Grounded in the rich cultural backdrop of Hillman College, the series highlights real-world experiences, fashion, music, talent, and life lessons, capturing the true essence of the Black college experience.

For viewers who did not attend a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) themselves, the series offers an intimate look at the culture that parents and grandparents have passed down through stories. By creating a bridge across generations, the show has accomplished something rare: a truly multigenerational viewing experience where whole families, grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters alike can sit together and share in a unifying cultural moment.

A Triumph in Casting, Culture, and Authenticity

What makes this series so magnetic and virtually impossible not to binge the entire 10-episode season in two days is the execution of its casting. The energy on screen is palpable and never feels rehearsed. Instead, the dynamics unfold organically. Every single character represents a distinct perspective, offering a well-rounded view of life where viewers can look at the screen and see themselves reflected back.

At the heart of this new generation is an exceptional main cast led by Maleah Joi Moon as Deborah Wayne, the free-spirited, fashion-forward youngest daughter of Whitley Gilbert and Dwayne Wayne, and Cornell Young IV as Shaquille Johnson, the charismatic son of Ron Johnson. They are joined by a powerhouse ensemble of rising talent, including Alijah Kai as Rashida Duvall, Jordan Aaron Hall as Amir, Kennedi Reece as Hazel, Chibuikem Uche as Kojo, and Elijah J. Roberts as Jalen. Together, this core group brings a fresh, vibrant energy to campus that feels grounded in reality.

The Complex Nuance of Black Love

Among the show’s standout elements is the connection between Maleah Joi Moon and Cornell Young IV. Their storyline delivers a balanced and nuanced portrayal of young Black love. Rather than relying on clichés or sensationalized drama, the series captures the actual reality of college relationships. It explores the complex balance of falling in love while navigating temptation, managing individual growth alongside shared intimacy, and confronting the inevitable frustrations that arise from miscommunication. Above all, it highlights the vital role of emotional intelligence, showing how young adults learn to listen, express vulnerability, and navigate real-life scenarios together.

A Bridge to Legacy

The new ensemble seamlessly shares the screen with the original icons who made Hillman a household name. Viewers are treated to guest and recurring appearances from Jasmine Guy as Whitley, Kadeem Hardison as Dwayne, Darryl M. Bell as Ron, Cree Summer as Freddie, Charnele Brown as Dr. Kimberly Reese Boyer, and Dawnn Lewis as Jaleesa. The world feels complete with returning alumni and campus figures played by Glynn Turman as Colonel Taylor, Jenifer Lewis as Professor Davenport, Jada Pinkett Smith as Lena James, Karen Malina White as Charmaine, Ajai Sanders as Gina, Norman Nixon Jr. as Professor Baptiste, and Cliff "Method Man" Smith as Coach Coles.

A New Era for Hillman: Defining Its Own Legacy

Without giving anything away, the finale episode delivers exceptional television. Between the soul-stirring music, the vibrant atmosphere, and the sheer emotional pull of the commencement ceremony, the season wraps in a way that leaves viewers spellbound, desperate for more, and eagerly analyzing every subtle hint about what lies ahead.

The writing and acting across the board demonstrate remarkable artistic direction. The creative team has a massive, unquestionable hit on their hands. Yes, the original A Different World was iconic, but this series boldly stands on its own feet, carving out its own narrative and legacy for a new generation to look forward to with every incoming class. Every cast member and person on this team is destined for greatness and success. This show feels hopeful, exciting, and essential leaving audiences eager to see what happens next for all of them.

 Cover Credit: Netflix

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When Black Sherif joined the virtual call, his earpiece was already plugged in. By the time we spoke, he had released Sun Sherif Vol. 1, a six-track project accompanied by sunflowers and a handwritten note. When I told him the note felt personal, he agreed. “Yeah, it was very personal. I did the writing myself.”

Born Ismail Sherif and raised in Konongo Zongo, somewhere within Ghana’s Ashanti Region, Black Sherif started making music in his final year of high school in 2019. Since then, he has used music to document his life, dreams and fantasies, describing his approach in terms of melodies, rhythms and frequency.

Music and fashion have always been closely connected for Black Sherif. He spoke about dressing with the familiarity of someone describing an interest he had long before music became his career, tracing it back to childhood, when he was old enough to choose his own clothes without his mother’s help. His appearances at London Fashion Week with Labrum and his Paris Fashion Week debut with Off-White reflect an interest that has been there from the beginning. “It's been with me,” he said. “With some unconscious intentionalities and consistencies.”

Even if he had never made music, he explained, dressing would still have been a hobby he paid close attention to. His interest in clothes was tied to his relationship with music, from listening to records to following the artists whose work he admired, long before he became an artist himself.

‍Sun Sherif Vol. 1 follows Iron Boy, an earlier project marked by a darker, more deliberate intensity. When I asked what had changed between the two, Black Sherif described the new EP in a way that stayed with me. “I won't say Sun Sherif is less deeper. I think it's the same as deep, but it's softly deep.” He spoke about approaching life with aggression as an experiment, a response to what he had experienced, and then wondering what it would mean to try the opposite. Sun Sherif Vol. 1 came out of that curiosity, allowing him to explore softness without abandoning the depth that has characterised his music.

The six-track release was also a deliberate choice of format. Black Sherif was clear that he considered it an EP, not an album, and the idea had been on his mind for years. “Somewhere 2020, I tweeted that I wanted to make one of the best R&B projects I'd heard,” he said. “And for some reason, unintentionally, I just did it this year.” His albums have typically run to thirteen to fifteen tracks, but this time he wanted a shorter project that could hold a particular experience without extending beyond it. The result is a more concentrated expression of what he had been exploring, delivered across six songs.

Jolie is the EP’s most devoted song, and the one Black Sherif chose as his personal favourite. When I asked how he writes with such vulnerability without revealing too much, he said, “I just write every single piece of mind. It's really just unfiltered. It's really just raw. Sometimes I'm not even intentional about being deep or vulnerable. That's just what comes out of me.” The feeling begins without much filtering, but the finished song still has to be shaped. Through ad libs, harmonies and the arrangement itself, he gives those thoughts a form that other people can sit with.

As Black Sherif’s music has connected with young people in Ghana and across the diaspora, the expectations around what he makes have grown. I asked how he manages that pressure without letting it dictate his work. He spoke about continuing to pursue the things he dreams of and envisions, even when the pressure affects him personally. “For some reason, the vision remains untouched,” he said. “And I can't explain that.” His answer suggested a distinction between the pressure he feels and the direction he wants to take. He returned to this idea of holding on to his own convictions while remaining open to other perspectives. “I do not believe there is one truth,” he said. “There are many truths. And even though I believe in mine and I stand firm in mine, I still make room for other truths.”

Sun Sherif Vol. 1 is the beginning of a larger project. Its sequel is coming, followed by an album, he notes, and he has more visuals planned, including two additional videos before the year ends. He also spoke about returning to the UK, a possible Zama Disco appearance and a trip to Lagos in the first quarter of next year. He has been spending time in the city writing, making music and taking care of himself, with the studio remaining a constant through it all.

Before we ended, I told him that Love Again was my favourite song on the EP, although I kept returning to Sacrifice from Iron Boy, particularly the way he sings the chorus. I couldn't quite explain what it was about the delivery that stayed with me. “The delivery,” he said. Then, warmly, “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

Cover Credit: Black Sherif 

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The P-square's split has been a large part of the conversation in the Afrobeats industry after it was announced in 2017. Before they became known as Mr P (Peter) and Rudeboy (Paul), P-square was a trailblazer duo who released five studio albums and performed at several sold-out concerts across Nigeria and abroad. 

Released in 2007, their third album, Game Over, is honest and a wee political. It reflects their inspiration of international acts like Micheal Jackson, Bobby Brown, and MC Hammer. The album weaves multiple romantic scenarios in the almost hour-long time sequence. One of P-square's biggest marketing values is their performance and Game Over was developed with visuals at its centre. The album had a music video for almost all the songs and this contributed to redefining African music videos for a modern audience. Game Over borrowed musical elements from RnB, hip-hop, and reggae. It is definitely one of their strongest works. 

The album comprises 10 songs. No One Like You opens the record, setting the tone for the romantic sojourn that defines it. Lyrics like, ‘You're the highest/When it comes to rating, you're the lead and No one be like you/Say they cannot replace you, 'cause you are a blessing,’ show the brothers confessing their undying adoration to their lover. The video of this track is almost crossing 70 million views and the song was sampled by Ugandan Reggae duo, Radio and Weasel, for their song Zuena in 2010. 

The title track of the album, Game Over, takes an angsty turn from the loving No One Like You as it explores a relationship on the brink of destruction. The mood of the album picks up in Do Me, a track that would definitely get you moving. The song features vocals from fellow Afro-pop star, Waje. Waje later claimed to not get paid for her vocals on the song. No formal contract was, apparently, signed to protect her copyright rights. This exposes the industry's shortcomings of failing to protect up and rising vocal talents through the right contractual agreements. The song's music video won many awards including Sound City Music Video Awards, Nigerian Music Video Awards, among others. 

Track number 4, Miss You Die, takes a somber detour on longing and romantic regrets. It's one of the songs that shows the group's singing capabilities. Why E Be Say reflects the struggles of the average Nigerian in 2007 but the sentiments that were addressed in the song still rings true for many Nigerians today. ‘In our society make we dey try to live like one family/What a tragedy with our wealth we still dey live in poverty/The wrong thing be said/As poor ones dey hala the rich ones dey hammer yes o.’ These lyrics expertly put the devastating class divide in Nigeria in a language that every Nigerian relates to. It's a tragedy for a nation rich in resources to be experiencing so much financial insecurity. 

More Than A Friend is another track with ambitious romantic storytelling. Am I Still That Special Man? sees P-square questioning a lover's infidelity over mellow RnB instrumentals. Ifunaya follows the same lyrical motives as No One Like You. Stand Up revisits the political instabilities of 2007, eight years after military rule. P-square is nostalgic about the great times of Nigeria and they encourage the common man to Stand Up to the corrupt government. Human Rights Watch published a paper on the 11th of October 2007, detailing Nigeria's worsening political crisis. They wrote that, "Violence, corruption and impunity are not just problems that the government has failed to tackle; they are systemic abuses that flow from the heart of the very same government institutions that should be working to combat them." 

The last track before the outro is Roll It. This is a club track and the lyrics doesn't deny it as P-square sings about admiring a girl dancing in the club. The album got a reissue with two remix tracks; Temptation and Bizzy Body. Both of those tracks featured Alaye and Weird MC respectively. Game Over is one of the timeless bodies of work from an African act, the album has more than 30 million streams on Spotify and is reported to have sold "nearly 8 million copies across Africa and the world." according to Native Magazine. 

Game Over gave us some of the most unforgettable hits of the 2000s. The singing and dancing twin duo released music under their records, Square Records but they have signed multiple record deals with labels, Akon's Konvict Records, Universal Music South Africa and Square Root Entertainment. P-square played a pivotal role in shaping Africa's music and entertainment landscape and as a duo, they've won multiple albums that crossed the continent. BET Awards, MTV Europe Music Awards, MOBO Awards, MTV Africa Music Awards and a couple more. 

Their single career paths as Mr P and Rude Boy continue to play an influence in Afro-pop. Mr P went on to create his record label, P-Classic Records and his 16-track album saw features from his peers in the industry, Tiwa Savage, Simi, Wande Coal,  and more. He won Best International Male Artist at the International Achievement Recognition Awards in 2018, his first award as a soloist. Rudeboy also founded his own label, Fire Department Inc. and he released his album Rudykillus in 2021. The video of one of his bonus tracks, Reason With Me has crossed 300 million views on YouTube. 

We might never get a P-square reunion after Peter's update on the group earlier this year. The update showed the audience how deep the familial disputes ran between the two brothers. Jude Okoye, their elder brother who was at the forefront of P-square's management, received criticism from Peter. 

He accused his two brothers (Paul and Jude) of mistreatment and harassment in the group regarding finances, management and a strong betrayal of their brotherhood. It was the nail on the coffin of P-square's future and it was a disappointment to fans who believed in their reunion. Paul and Jude are yet to issue an official response to his allegations. P-square's career might be over but their Afro-pop legacy is going to remain forever carved in stone. 

Cover Credit via Life And Times Magazine

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Rachel Ojuromi Makes Her Chanel Runway Debut in Paris

From recreating Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel looks on the streets of Lagos to walking for the French fashion house in Paris, Rachel Ojuromi’s latest fashion moment feels particularly full circle.

Rachel Ojuromi has made her Chanel runway debut.

The Nigerian model and creative appeared on the runway in Paris for Chanel under creative director Matthieu Blazy, marking another major step in a rise that has increasingly captured fashion’s attention.

But Ojuromi’s relationship with Blazy’s Chanel makes the moment more interesting than another major runway booking.

From Lagos to Chanel

Earlier this year, Ojuromi began attracting international attention through a series of fashion videos shot around Lagos. Rather than waiting for fashion’s traditional institutions to give her a platform, she made the city her runway styling, documenting and interpreting fashion through her own perspective.

One of those moments saw Ojuromi recreate looks from Chanel’s Métiers d’Art collection using clothes she already owned.

It wasn’t simply an imitation of what had appeared on the runway. Chanel was filtered through Ojuromi’s world: different clothes, a different city and a distinctly personal approach to styling.

The videos travelled.

So did her name.

Ojuromi’s work caught the attention of fashion audiences internationally and, importantly, Matthieu Blazy himself.

Rachel Ojuromi Had Already Named Chanel as a Dream

Ojuromi has been open about her admiration for Blazy and his work.

In the months before her Chanel runway appearance, she spoke about the designer as one of her major fashion inspirations and named Chanel among the houses she dreamed of working with.

Then the distance between reference and reality suddenly became very small.

The designer whose work she had been interpreting from Lagos cast her in Chanel.

For Ojuromi, it creates the kind of fashion story that is difficult to manufacture: a young creative engaging with a house from thousands of miles away, being noticed by the person behind it, and eventually becoming part of the runway herself.

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More Than a Viral Fashion Moment

It would be easy to frame Ojuromi’s Chanel debut as the culmination of a viral moment.

It is probably more interesting to see it as the continuation of one.

Ojuromi has built much of her identity around making the process visible. Her fashion content doesn’t begin when she reaches Paris or gets access to designer clothes. The limitations, experimentation, references and environment around her are part of the work.

That philosophy also sits behind The Process Africa, the platform Ojuromi created to spotlight emerging African creatives while they are still becoming — rather than waiting until international recognition makes their stories worth telling.

Her Chanel appearance now gives that idea another meaning.

Fashion has historically operated through a relatively predictable sequence: institutions identify talent, give it visibility and audiences discover it afterwards.

Ojuromi’s trajectory points towards something different.

She developed the language publicly. The audience arrived. Fashion noticed.

And then came Chanel.

Rachel Ojuromi’s Next Chapter

A Chanel runway debut will inevitably bring a new level of attention to Rachel Ojuromi, but perhaps the most compelling part of her story is what happens next.

The Lagos streets that once functioned as her runway have now led to one of fashion’s most recognisable houses.

Yet the significance isn’t that Chanel suddenly made Rachel Ojuromi interesting.

It’s that she had already built a world interesting enough for Chanel to notice.

From Lagos to Paris, the process continues.

Before there was DJ Six7even, there was David Etuk the petroleum engineering student carrying a first-class average through year three, holding two scholarships at once, interning at ExxonMobil, doing the maths and the physics not because he had to, but because he loved it. "I actually loved studying petroleum engineering," he says, without a trace of the irony you'd expect from someone who walked away from it entirely. "I loved the academic work. I loved maths. Physics was my best subject."

DJ Six7even didn't leave engineering because he burned out or lost interest. He left because something else pulled harder. "I would only do what I love, go where I love, be with who I love," he says. The degree wasn't a mistake he's since corrected. It was proof of a mind that finishes what it starts, redirected toward a different structure entirely.

His latest status description, DJ executive, sounds like branding until you trace it back to where it actually comes from. An engineer thinks in systems, load-bearing structures, resource management, how to build something that holds together under pressure. Six7even didn't set that instinct down when he left school. He picked up a different material to build with.

From Haircut to Holding Company

The name itself started as nothing. During a session in his hair stylist's chair, his hair curled up into an unexpected shape, and a random passerby commented that it looked like a pineapple. It stuck the way nicknames do, randomly, permanently, without his input. "My height, I didn't choose it," he says of the other half of the equation, the six-foot-something frame that makes him impossible to miss in any room he enters. "I had to make peace with it."

What he's done since is the part worth paying attention to. In 2026, "Pineapple" stopped being something that happened to him and became something he built. His Pineapple Head Collective is not a merch line or a vanity project, it's a structure, DJs at the center, intertwined with music releases, live events, merchandise, and a pipeline for spotting the next generation of talent coming out of Africa. "It's about building an actual, intertwined, functioning system," he explains, "with DJs in the centre of it."

That word, system, is doing a lot of work. It's the engineer talking. Somewhere between the classroom and the club, he stopped seeing the DJ and the executive as two separate jobs competing for the same hours, and started designing an ecosystem where both roles function without collapsing into each other.

"You know how to manage resources, outsource jobs, network," he says of the mindset he's now building into the collective from day one, rather than learning it the hard way, years into a career, the way he had to.

Even his one unprompted digression, a stray fact about how nearly everything in modern life traces back to oil and gas, reads less like a tangent and more like a signature. The engineering never left. It just became the invisible infrastructure underneath a nightlife brand.

The Sunset Mix
Not a sunset clause.

Six7even has always treated music as something built to bring people into the same room, not just something played at them. That instinct is at the center of the Sunset Mix, a set built around daylight instead of darkness, played between 6 and 7, the same hours baked into his own name. It's less a gimmick than a return to something specific, the daytime energy he's long been associated with, stripped of the usual nightlife trappings and built instead around sun, open air, and Amapiano.

"Amapiano just hits differently when the sun is out," he says, and he's not being poetic about it. It's practically the whole thesis behind the Sunset Mix.

It's a small detail, but it says something larger about how he thinks about his own brand, that "Six7even" was never just a stage name to begin with. It was always a blueprint waiting to be used, the same instinct that turned a haircut into a holding company, now turning a number into a format.

Becoming Six7even

None of the pipeline from David to Six7Even happened overnight. In the summer of 2018, before any of the cities, before the name meant anything, he was sleeping in his car between club trials, doing sets he knew were good, and then waiting on calls that didn't come. "That was the last time I felt unseen, to be honest with you," he says. He kept going anyway, and his breakout moment happened. 

Being seen, it turns out, comes with its own kind of isolation. He describes standing in the middle of a set, 3,000 people losing themselves to the music, and finding himself somewhere else entirely for five full seconds, present in body, gone in mind. "I felt like I was alone in a space of three thousand people," he says. The one constant through both the invisible years and the sold-out ones has been the same friend, Judy, checking in on the person underneath the name on the flyer, not the performance. "Are you okay to play this gig," he recalls her asking, a question almost no one else thinks to ask a man everyone assumes has it all figured out.

The Quest for Stardom 

Ask him what success used to look like, and he'll tell you it used to be smaller and more local, being the biggest nightlife DJ in Lagos, running multiple clubs a night. That version of the dream has been replaced, not abandoned, but outgrown. "The dream got bigger," he says. "It changed to be the biggest DJ export out of Africa."

Underneath the ambition sits a simpler operating principle: being human is the only qualification he requires from anyone, regardless of class or status, and making people happy is what makes the work worth doing. It's a mature worldview from someone whose public image still trades heavily on height and a haircut.

The ‘Hair’ Line

For someone whose entire image trades on being larger than life, literally, he's surprisingly precise about where the boundaries sit. "There's a line," he says, talking about the industry, the crowd, the version of himself that shows up under the lights. "You can dance on it, moonwalk on it, twerk on it. But don't cross it."

It's a small piece of philosophy, delivered almost in passing, but it says more about his longevity than anything about the height or the haircut ever could. He's not interested in shock value or chaos for its own sake, he's interested in range, how far you can push a moment, how much personality you can bring to it, without losing the thing that makes people trust you in the first place. Dance on the line all night. Just don't cross it.

It's the same instinct that shows up in how he talks about people generally, off the decks entirely. Status, class, none of it moves the needle for him. "The fact that you are human already qualifies you as a higher animal," he says, "not just any other animal." Respect isn't earned through who you know or where you're from, it's the baseline, extending the moment two people's paths cross. Making people happy, he says plainly, is what makes him happy.

Put together, it's a quieter kind of maturity than the one the industry usually rewards, less about restraint for its own sake, more about knowing exactly where your own line is, and never needing anyone to remind you where it was.

Strip away the nickname, the stature, the crowd, and what's left is not a mystery, he's already told you. A first-class engineering student who chose sound as his medium and never stopped thinking like a systems builder.

A haircut that became a holding company. A kid who slept in his car in 2018, still building, still executing, still proving to himself that what you genuinely love can be taken all the way to the biggest stages in the world.

Cover Credit; Tomi O'nezer

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The first thing  SPACESHIP Billy, said when the call connected was “suffering and smiling.” He laughed after saying it, setting the tone for a conversation that moved easily between serious reflection and humour. Nigerian-born and London-raised, Billy has spent the last ten years as the official disc jockey for Burna Boy, working alongside the artist through the growth of his career. His role within that world, however, extends well beyond the turntables. 

For Spaceship Billy, being Burna Boy’s official DJ involves more than selecting music for live performances. As he explained, “There's so many conversations that happen in the background.” He hears music before it is released and gives feedback on what he thinks will connect with different audiences, drawing on his own instincts and experience. Within the Spaceship Collective, he said, his opinion carries the same weight as other members of the team. “It's not seen as, oh, this person's just a DJ,” he said. “Everybody's input is taken on and it's seen as equal.” After ten years working alongside Burna Boy, Billy has become part of the wider creative process, contributing to decisions that extend beyond what happens on stage.

Over the past ten years, Billy has watched the stages grow from small clubs to stadiums, with each setting demanding a different approach. He pointed to the differences between New York and Atlanta, and between Toronto and Montreal, where the French influence can change the atmosphere of a room. Playing for a global audience, he explained, means recognising the cultures within it, even when the crowd has come to see the same artist. “You have to understand that although it's one artist and it's one vision, there's different kinds of cultures that you have to try and communicate with.” Years of touring with Burna Boy have given him experience adapting to those differences from one city to the next.

‍Method Man

Billy’s approach to production also depends on listening closely and being willing to change his mind. He described starting with drums, building the melody around them and removing anything that does not serve the track. Sometimes, he returns to a piece days later and hears it differently. “I might listen to the track one day, come back to it again and be like, nah, actually I don't like that bit,” he said. “Or I might have heard something somewhere else which has inspired the way I kind of feel about it again on another day.” What he hears outside the studio can change how he approaches a track when he returns to it, leaving room for new ideas to influence the production as it develops.

Afrobeats’ global rise is often discussed through its performance on Western charts, streaming numbers and international collaborations. Spaceship Billy offered a perspective shaped by growing up with the music long before that wider recognition. “Afrobeats has always been big in its own circles,” he said. During his university years, artists such as P-Square, Tony Tetuila, Magic System, Premier Gaou and Wizkid were already part of his listening, alongside the Fuji music his parents brought from Nigeria to London. “We were listening to Fuji music. I was even listening to Sunny Ade through my mum and dad.” His recollection speaks to a musical culture that was already thriving within the communities around him, even as its international profile continued to grow. When I pointed out that he had answered two of my questions at once, he replied, “Double whammy,” and laughed.

Before he became Spaceship Billy, he was known as Bill Gates -- the DJ name he used in his early career sojourn -- he had built a reputation in his own scene before working with Burna Boy. It made the question of being identified primarily through his association with Burna Boy particularly interesting. When I asked whether it bothered him, he considered both sides. After ten years working with someone, he explained, the association is natural, much like being identified with the company you work for. At the same time, he had his own ambitions long before the partnership. “I was always a DJ in my own entity before Burna Boy. I was always kind of having that vision for myself.” He also sees the association as something to be proud of. “If they say you're Burna Boy's DJ, it's not a negative stance. I think it's more of an identification to greatness.”

Outside his work as a DJ and producer, Billy is involved in event management and the IT operations of the Spaceship Collective, alongside making time for the gym and his family. “It's not just deck one, deck two,” he said. “There's a business side aspect that I'm a part of.” Looking ahead, he wants to spend more time producing music and encouraging younger people to take education seriously alongside their creative ambitions. He sees understanding technology as especially important, warning that without knowing how things work, young people risk missing opportunities. “Things are going to go past you,” he said. “So I think that for me, something that I would like to kind of inspire in the younger generation.”

Over ten years with Burna Boy and the Spaceship Collective, Spaceship Billy has built a role that extends beyond the decks, contributing to creative decisions, production and the business behind the music while continuing to develop his own ambitions. He opened our conversation with “suffering and smiling,” a phrase that stayed with us as we moved between the serious and the funny, the work people see and the work that happens in the background.

Cover Credit: Spaceship Billy

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By blending the soul of R&B with the rhythm and freedom of bouyon, Fallon is creating a sound that’s deeply personal, proudly Caribbean, and entirely her own.

Some artists spend years searching for a sound that feels entirely their own. For Fallon, that journey led her back to her roots. Instead of chasing trends, she found inspiration in the music and culture that shaped her, creating a sound that’s as personal as it is powerful.

Blending the emotion and intimacy of R&B with the infectious rhythms of bouyon, Fallon is carving out a space that feels both contemporary and deeply connected to Caribbean culture. Rather than chasing trends or following a formula, her music is guided by instinct, an honest reflection of who she is and where she comes from.

As bouyon continues to gain long-overdue international recognition, Fallon sees an opportunity not only to introduce audiences to the genre, but to celebrate the culture that shaped her. For her, this isn’t simply about creating music; it’s about carrying a heritage forward while building a new artistic identity.

With a new era on the horizon, Deeds sat down with Fallon to discuss identity, the evolution of bouyon, and why authenticity remains at the centre of everything she creates.

Linda for Deeds: Welcome to Deeds. For those discovering you for the first time, who is Fallon?

My name is Fallon. I’m a singer, and my music lives somewhere between R&B and bouyon. That’s the world I’m trying to create, one where emotion, rhythm and my Caribbean roots all come together naturally.

Your music feels like a meeting point between two different worlds. How would you describe your musical universe?

My universe is really an experience before anything else. It comes from my love of singing R&B, but also from rhythm, energy and movement. At the same time, I wanted to pay tribute to my Caribbean culture through bouyon. Bringing those two worlds together felt completely natural to me because they’re both part of who I am.

My music is where R&B meets my Caribbean identity.

For people who may be hearing about bouyon for the first time, how would you explain it?

Bouyon is a genre that was born in Dominica before spreading throughout the Caribbean. It’s energetic, hybrid and constantly evolving because it mixes so many different influences. What I love most about it is that its essence is freedom. There are very few limits to what you can create with it.

What does bouyon represent to you personally, and to Caribbean culture more broadly?

It’s much more than a genre of music. It’s a cultural movement. Bouyon is about expressing yourself freely, embracing rhythm and energy without holding back. For Caribbean people, it’s part of our identity, and I think that’s what makes it so powerful.

Bouyon is freedom. It’s a way of expressing who we are without limits.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen bouyon reach audiences far beyond the Caribbean. How do you feel watching that evolution?

Honestly, I never thought it would grow this much. Especially when you remember that in mainland France during the 2010s, bouyon wasn’t always well understood or appreciated. Seeing it finally reach new audiences and receive more recognition is something really special. It shows that people are becoming more open to discovering different cultures and sounds.

Are there artists who’ve had a major influence on your own sound?

Not really. I listen to a lot of music, of course, but I don’t try to recreate what someone else has already done. My goal has always been to build something instinctive and personal, something that people immediately recognise as mine.

‍ Is there an artist you’d love to collaborate with one day?

Hamza. (Laughs.) I think our universes could complement each other really well.

Is there one song that best represents who you are today?

I’d say “Normal.” That’s the track where the balance between R&B and bouyon feels the most natural. It’s also the song people connect with the most, which tells me that they understand the direction I’m trying to take artistically.

‍ Where do you see yourself, and your music, in the next five years?

I see myself becoming even more confident in who I am. I want to be more aligned with myself and more transparent in what I create. As an artist, my goal is to keep evolving while staying honest. The more I grow, the more I want my music to reflect who I really am.

Finally, what would you like to say to everyone who’s been supporting you?

First of all, thank you. It means everything to know people are following this journey. I want everyone to know that I’m coming back different. This is a new era for me, with new music and new singles that really represent the artist I’ve become. I can’t wait for people to hear what’s coming next.

Rather than forcing two genres together, Fallon allows R&B and bouyon to exist in conversation with one another. The result is music that feels deeply personal while remaining rooted in Caribbean culture. As bouyon continues to reach new audiences around the world, artists like Fallon are expanding its future by embracing, rather than diluting, the traditions that shaped them. If this new era is any indication, Fallon is only beginning to discover the full potential of her voice.

Credits: 

Artist: Fallon @quiestfallon

Photographer: frederic magalhaes @fredericmagalhaes_ 

Creative Director/ Stylist: Linda Benro @styliddie 

Photo assist: Noé Lalanne Bernagozzi

Art direction & Assistant Stylist: Elliot Morpuss @elliotmorpuss 

Assistant Stylist: Ilayda Gul @ilayda_gul24

Videographer: Marvyn Ngikila @marvyn_07

Production: Sylva Mobali @mobaliprod

Interview: Linda Benro @styliddie

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Tattoos have become one of the most popular forms of body modification among young people. Yet they are far from a Gen Z phenomenon. Tattooing has existed for thousands of years across cultures in Japan, Polynesia and numerous African communities, including those in Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania. These permanent designs are created by inserting ink and pigments into the dermis, the skin’s deeper layer.

In Nigeria, permanent body markings have long appeared across different cultures. Among Yoruba communities, facial markings and scarification historically signalled lineage and identity, while other forms of body marking across the country have conveyed courage, beauty or spiritual protection.

Tattoo artist Emmanuel Item describes his style as “West African Tribalwork” and treats his art “like a living archive.” He spoke at length about Africa’s tattoo heritage, noting that it was not originally practised simply for fashion or style.

“Back then, our grandparents used to carry different styles of tattoos, which were lost [...] around our parents’ generation,” he explained. “In the old times, tattoos and scarification had healing purposes. They were used to protect the wearer spiritually or show someone’s identity and tribe.”

The fashionable business of tattoos 

Tattoo imagery is no stranger to the fashion world. In 2014, one of Maison Martin Margiela’s couture pieces featured an intricately embroidered top based on the work of tattoo legend Norman “Sailor Jerry” Collins. One of America’s most influential tattoo artists, Collins helped define the American traditional tattoo style.

Tattooing has also had notable runway moments in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 1994 Les Tatouages collection and Rodarte’s Spring 2010 show.

For Ola, a 24-year-old Nigerian artist whose personal style is heavily inspired by gothic and alternative culture, tattoos are both fashionable and political. “Sometimes, tattoos go beyond fashion because they’re permanent and deeply personal. There’s a personal connection and ownership of oneself involved in deciding what you want to permanently put on your body.”

Ola has two tattoos, one of which was designed by her boyfriend. She has since attached sentimental meaning to the tattoo and the memory of having it inked.

Many of the tattoo artists we spoke with see a direct link between tattoos and personal style. It is unsurprising that tattoos appear across fashion subcultures such as hippie and alt-goth. Both Inked by Shallz and Emmanuel agree that tattoos can function as accessories to a person’s style.

Bizzyaski Tattoos offered a more cautionary view: “Five years back, people didn’t care about the meaning of tattoos; they just wanted anything they liked on their bodies. I always give advice on what a client wants to put on their body, regardless of their personal style, because it is something that will be part of them for the rest of their life. So, it must have great meaning.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of the connection between tattoos and personal style is the symbolism behind the designs and the styles to which people are drawn. Emmanuel Item runs ỌJI HUB, a studio in Vienna—ọjị means kola nut in Igbo—and believes clients need to find the right tattooist to express themselves fully.

He never repeats a tattoo, and his work contains extensive cultural symbolism. According to him, most of his clients want to “express their connection to their ancestral roots on the African continent, often through symbolic elements from their cultures.”

He has also observed the effect of tattoo trends on personal style: “You will see a certain ‘trashy’ adaptation of ’90s tribal tattoos, now called cybersigilism, that became super popular during my years living in Berlin.”

The cyclical nature of fashion trends and the permanence of tattoos create an intriguing style contradiction. Bizzyaski Tattoos noted that popular design preferences often differ by gender. His male clients mostly favour religious imagery such as praying hands, Jesus and crucifixes, while his female clients are drawn to flowers, phoenixes and butterflies.

Inked by Shallz says her clients “are drawn towards tattoos that have personal meaning, mostly names, dates or symbols that remind them of people they love or stories that mean a lot to them.”

Tattoos and the society

Across ancient Egypt and parts of Southeast Asia, tattooing has at different times carried spiritual, religious or protective meanings. Today, some evangelical Christians interpret biblical teachings as prohibiting tattoos, while many Sunni Islamic scholars consider permanent tattoos as haram. Christianity and Islam are Nigeria’s predominant religions, and these beliefs continue to shape public perceptions of tattoos.

Where, then, is the line between self-expression and socioreligious expectations? The #EndSARS protests of October 2020 brought wider attention to the harassment faced by young Nigerians whose appearance was considered alternative. Such profiling has led to arrests, detention and, in graver cases, deaths. The protests exposed abuses by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad and led to its official disbandment.

Although SARS has officially been disbanded, the stigma remains: tattoos are still frequently viewed as rebellious or immature in Nigeria. I wondered how much room fashion leaves for self-expression when society places limitations on that expression.

Ola’s response was simple: “F***k it all.

“Part of existing authentically is being willing to sit with the discomfort that other people might have about the way you choose to exist. I’m aware that negative views exist, but they don’t determine what I put on my body. I’m very attached to my identity, and other people’s perceptions cannot take that away from me.”

Since she began tattooing in 2023, Inked by Shallz has witnessed clients being harassed or questioned by the authorities because of their tattoos. 

“I’ve had several incidents where clients came back to cover up tattoos of birds I had done for them earlier, not because they didn’t like them, but because they had been harassed by police officers who accused them of belonging to a certain cult associated with birds. Another client came to cover up the number 777 because some cultists threatened to cut off his hand if he kept the tattoo.”

She added that tattoos are increasingly being viewed through a less rebellious lens. Some clients are becoming comfortable with visible placements, while others now bring their parents to tattoo appointments. These, she said, are some of her favourite sessions.

Mofe, a visual artist from Lagos, rarely encounters trouble from members of the public or the authorities, partly because of the size and placement of his tattoos. Tunta, who has 12 tattoos, sometimes highlights “certain tattoos or makes them more visible.” Societal expectations, however, do not affect her tattoo choices.

For her, “Getting tattoos makes me feel like my body is mine, and I can do whatever I like with it.”

Emmanuel attributes many of the negative stereotypes surrounding tattoos in Nigeria and across much of Africa to colonialism. 

“Colonialism, religion and certain individuals spread pseudoscience about tattoos,” he said. “This created a negative stigma that has become deeply embedded in cultures around the world.”

He nevertheless believes young people can give tattoos a more positive image in society.

Bizzyaski Tattoos operates studios in Nigeria and New York, and he noted little difference between how tattoos are received by his clients at home and abroad. 

Speaking about the police stereotyping tattooed people as criminals, Bizzyaski said that when clients do not know their rights as Nigerians, societal pressure can heavily influence the tattoo styles they choose.

Tattoos in fashion: A hit or a miss?

The answer to “Are tattoos fashionable?” is complicated because tattoos are deeply subjective. Different people get them for different reasons.

Mofe believes tattoos can be fashionable. He explained it through an interior-design metaphor—a telling choice, given his work in production design: “It’s like a plain wall versus a mural wall. It can make a person more visually interesting.”

Inked by Shallz insists that tattoos do not exist separately from fashion: “Fashion isn’t just about what you put on your body but also how you present your body. Tattoos can completely change how a look comes together. They can be the main statement or they can feel delicate, like an accessory.”

Ola believes tattoos contribute to her style, while Tunta says they are not necessarily central to hers.

Tattoos exist on a subjective plane, inviting different opinions into the conversation. Yet reducing them to a debate about whether they are stylish sweeps their culturally rich history under the rug. Tattooing has existed for thousands of years. Like other forms of visual art, it transcends fashion and style.

Cover Credits: unorthodox reviews via Instagram 

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Teledalase appears in a blue-and-purple patterned headwrap tied high around her head, gold hoop earrings and a gold-toned necklace over a simple black top. Her makeup is understated, with a matte lip, two nose piercings and a pair of small matching pieces sitting together beneath her lower lip. Framed photographs and artwork fill the space behind her. The whole room felt like a memory, a piece of her occupying the entire space. 

As she speaks about her music, she becomes increasingly animated, moving between ideas about culture, language, grief and artistic freedom with the kind of enthusiasm that makes it clear she has spent a lot of time thinking about what she wants her work to say. When asked to introduce herself and her music, she does not reach for a genre or a career summary; she reaches for water. “I would describe my music as water,” she says. “There are many ways that water can exist and be. I can be as deep and vast as the ocean, and then I can still be what you need on a hot day. I can be as redeeming and as refreshing as you going to the river on a hot day to take a bath. It is what it is in whatever context or structure that you meet it, and however you find it is however it's supposed to be.” 

The comparison makes sense when you look across Teledalase’s work. Her music moves between Yoruba culture, personal experience, folk traditions and contemporary sounds without settling into one fixed identity. She is Nigerian-American, with an artistic lineage that runs deep into Yoruba culture. Her father was a visual artist, her mother a dancer and theatre practitioner whose dance troupe, Omitun, gave Teledalase early access to live cultural performance, and her paternal grandfather was a founding member of the Mbari Mbayo Club & Oshogbo Art movement. That inheritance has shaped the way she understands music and language. Yoruba was not simply a language she grew up speaking. She described it as a language capable of expressing things that English could not, particularly through its proverbs and emotional textures, and connected the renewed use of Yoruba in contemporary Nigerian music to a much older tradition carried by artists like King Sunny Ade and Ebenezer Obey.

Her 2024 debut EP, The ones who didn't die, Pt. 1, introduced that foundation to a wider audience. Her contribution to Netflix’s Aníkúlápó: Rise of the Spectre placed her work within a larger Yoruba cultural and spiritual world, while Apple Music named her an Africa Rising artist in 2025. Then came The Bad Wife Has No Tongue, in 2025, a deeply personal project that some listeners could have read as a departure from the work that came before it. Teledalase does not see it that way because, for her, there has never been one fixed version of what her music is supposed to sound like.

“I am just making music,” she says, when asked whether she sees her projects as parts of one larger creative world. “I am so anti-branding — which is very weird because in the music industry nowadays, we're all being pushed to create a brand of some sort. If I have something to say, I'm going to say it in music. The Bad Wife Has No Tongue is a deeply personal project. It doesn't mean I'm going to do a second one. Maybe the next album would be about me being in love, and people will be like, what the hell? Where did this come from?” That unpredictability has followed her through the catalogue. After the Aníkúlápó soundtrack, she released Peace, a song she had written years earlier and which existed in a very different register from the music people had started associating with her. Listeners who had begun to categorise her as a Yoruba artist were unsettled by the shift. Teledalase was not.

“If there's one thing about me, you cannot put me in a box. Life is too short for me to turn myself into this one-dimensional person. Everybody else can package it for you. That is their choice. But because I don't have eternity, I'm going to have fun with music.” For Teledalase, that freedom also comes from a belief that music should have room for subjects that do not always fit into commercial Afrobeats. She spoke about folk music as a space for grief, labour, contradiction and the less polished parts of everyday life. She referenced Taste of Life as an example of a song addressing subjects unlikely to become club hits but still worth documenting. She also spoke about music as political resistance and about existence itself as an act of resistance for Nigerians and Black people living within systems that place limits on what they can become.

“Being Nigerian or Black means dreaming beyond limits despite what the system puts in front of you,” she says. “Music like ‘Shungu’ embodies that - a resilience and an unshakeable spirit.”

That understanding of music has also been shaped by grief. Her father’s death interrupted the creative process she had been building. The EP The Blue Child had explored their relationship while he was alive, but after his death, she found herself unable to return to that material in the same way. Grief, she explained, was still too blurry to turn into music. “Grief must unfold naturally before it can be captured in music. I'm not ready yet.”

The tree that appears throughout her work, and most explicitly in SANGO, IGI NLA, her September 2026 single drawing on Yoruba mythology and the symbolism of the thunder tree, offers another way of understanding that patience. She described Iginla as a female spirit representing “unbreakable persistence” and spoke about finding whatever keeps you grounded, whether that is family, faith, music or community, and holding onto it. The idea of rootedness sits alongside the movement in her music. SANGO, IGI NLA reaches into Yoruba mythology and ancestral reverence, using traditional percussion, chants and an invocation-like vocal delivery, while the rest of her catalogue refuses to remain in one musical or emotional space. The two things are not contradictory for Teledalase. Being rooted does not require staying still.

She pointed to Rema as an artist she respects for the same reason. “Because he has the audacity sometimes to just go against the grain, and those are my people,” she says. What interests her is not unpredictability as a marketing strategy, but the freedom to follow an instinct even when the audience does not know what to expect next. “Today they love you, tomorrow they don't,” she says. “That is not a currency I am willing to bank on. When I take my last breath, I don't want to say at least I gave people what they wanted. I want to leave a legacy that I designed - not based on what people told me to do.”

For someone who describes her music as water, the refusal to stay in one shape is perhaps the most consistent thing about her work. The projects can change, the languages can change, the subjects can change, and the sound can move somewhere listeners were not expecting. What remains is the freedom to follow the next thing that feels worth making.

Credit: Teledalase

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