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A group of teachers pulled Josh Levi aside one day from the rest of the class. Mortified, scared, and mostly confused, Josh reluctantly obliged, anxiously waiting to see how much trouble he was in. What exactly did they want? He wasn’t even the troublemaker type.
“Josh, can you sing that song that you were singing in the hallway?” they said excitedly.
Surprised and honored, Josh was relieved. He wasn’t in trouble. He landed at the genesis of the innate power music would hold in his life.
“I was so young, and I was confused at first, but I recognized at that moment that God gave me a gift that could make people feel something. From that point on, I was obsessed and addicted to the opportunity to make people feel.” – Josh Levi
Deeds Magazine sat down with actor, singer, performer, and multihyphenate Josh Levi to learn more about his music, tour, and his creative journey within the industry.
EMEM IKPOT: I’m super interested in learning more about your sound, specifically the R&B sonic textures for Hydraulic. Now that you’ve performed these songs on tour, has the energy of your shows influenced how you want your next project to sound, or did it just confirm you’re on the right path sonically?
JOSH LEVI: It more so confirmed that I want to stay in the energy that I'm on. I only ever create music that I’m excited to perform. That's how I know that I like a song, or that I like what I'm creating—if I can see myself performing it. If I visualize myself on stage, if I can see the music video– that's how I know I'm connecting with the music. And with this tour, it blew me away that I could bring to life the energy the fans gave me. This was exactly what I was going for.
EMEM IKPOT: Are there certain songs that you absolutely loved performing on tour, and are there ones that were more difficult, maybe emotionally?
JOSH LEVI: 1000%. Every song is completely different for me. I have some songs that are like, super fun and easy to escape to and just let go. Songs like Crash Out, and Don't Go. I really enjoy performing. NAMEONIT on my album is also really fun and upbeat. Other records are more vulnerable, where I do have to tap into something deeper. Songs like I Can't Go Outside, take me back to the very vulnerable and intimate place where I was when I was writing it. And then with How It's Supposed To Be, after finishing that song, I had to take a moment of silence during the performance. My fans just stared at me, but I was really fine with it. It takes me there every single time.
EMEM IKPOT: From your earlier records DISC 1, to DISC 2, all the way to Hydraulic, what was your experience like working on each of these records–in terms of your process, inspiration, collaboration? Has your process changed over time?
JOSH LEVI:Disc 1 and Disc 2 were both EPs. With Hydraulic, it had much more internal reflection. I dug super deep within myself. Not that I didn't dig deep with my EPs, but for Hydraulic, that's the most introspective work I've ever approached, because I was super passionate about bringing young Josh, who started out in music in Houston, Texas—the nine-year-old—to the party. My first experiences of music, my first relationship with music, I wanted to include that version of Josh as well. And so for Hydraulic, I meditated and prayed so much to really bridge those two versions of myself, the current Josh and the Josh where it all began. I think that's why, for me, the music on Hydraulic and the records on that project feel like they hold a lot more weight than my other EPs. Not to say that it's any better or less, it's just deeper.
EMEM IKPOT: It's interesting, because I feel like a lot of times, especially as a creative in the space, when you think about that original moment where you knew that you wanted to do something big, creative, and new—you tend to be really young. And when you actually get to doing that thing, you’re much older, but that young version of yourself that brought you to where you are now still exists. Actively bringing that young version with you to where you are now feels like a full-circle moment where everything is coming together in a real way, like the culmination of it all. Cause when we’re really focused and really in the creative zone, it’s really easy to forget that young self. And it’s like, wait…I'm remembering that young Emem, or that young Josh, who loves this stuff, and I want to bring them with me in this moment, too.
JOSH LEVI: Yeah, it's hilarious because it's like, this album is definitely a conversation between my current self and young Josh.
How are things going?
Why are we doing this again?
Why is music the thing that we feel so passionate about?
How did we get here?
It was a lot of those conversations, but definitely a full-circle moment. A culmination of my journey to date. I think Hydraulic will always have a special place in my heart for that reason. I was also very passionate about creating a debut album that reflected me in such a massive way, because it is my first album. You can only really have one first album. If you've never listened to me before, or if you will never listen to me again— I really worked to have a strong sonic blueprint of the story of Josh Levi.
EMEM IKPOT: Tell me a bit more about your background and your growth in the music industry. I know you’ve done acting, singing, performing, etc.— what really drove you to music?
JOSH LEVI: Church. I started singing in church. I grew up in the church in Houston, Texas. Gospel music was a huge thing in my orbit and in my family. We would hear it in cars, radios, TV screens, soundtracks, etc—that's all I ever heard. And so the good thing about that is, I was privy to only incredible singing at all times. That's all my ears heard. I was in so many local church communities, like the choir, and a bunch of other local stuff in Houston. I always tell the story: I remember singing in the hallway or in the bathroom at my elementary school, and my teachers pulled me into the principal's office with a bunch of the staff. I thought I was in trouble. They’re like, “Josh, can you sing that song that you were singing in the hallway?” And I was like, okay. Sure. I'll never forget how emotional they were as I was singing. It was some gospel song. I wish I could remember which song it was. I was so young, and I was confused at first, but I recognized at that moment that God gave me a gift that could make people feel something. From that point on, I was obsessed and addicted to the opportunity to make people feel.
EMEM IKPOT: I did a piece on D'Angelo, underscoring how important the Black church was for him and his music. And I feel like for a lot of artists, especially Black artists, the church is really such a strong fixture and source of inspiration. I think about this a lot now, in terms of artists who don't have that background and how it can impact their sonic sensibility or how they approach music. I think the Black church really does hold a very special place in crafting music.
JOSH LEVI: Yeah, musically, it's unmatched, and I think church, gospel, sound, and music are very divine. There's an anointing and a flow there that makes for a really, really special foundation for all music. I think gospel music is influential in every single genre. It is soulful. It is R&B. It is pop. It is even hip-hop. The stuff I grew up with, from Kirk Franklin, Israel Houghton, and Mary Mary, and even the traditional gospel sound still had 808s and high hats. I personally feel very grateful for having that church background because I only ever heard amazing quality vocals. Amazing quality music– band, instruments, and incredible sound in my ears. I got accustomed to that.
EMEM IKPOT: What musicians do you look up to as an artist— are there artists that inspire your sound?
JOSH LEVI: I'm inspired by so many people. Michael Jackson, Aaliyah, Beyoncé. Drake. Tems is a huge inspiration for me. I love Afrobeats, African music in general.
I'm inspired by a spectrum of so much. I mentioned gospel, I listen to French music. I also am a huge hip hop head, but like, a specific lane of hip hop, not necessarily contemporary today, but Future, Wayne, Drake. Travis Scott. On the singing side, I like artists who are anti the system—artists that push the boundaries, that go against the status quo — those people have always spoken to me.
EMEM IKPOT: How do you feel about the R&B landscape at this current moment?
JOSH LEVI: I think R&B is in a beautiful place. The window is finally opening for the true impact of R&B. For so long, R&B has kind of been dismissed in terms of its impact and its influence. But right now, in terms of where we're at in the world, people want to feel good, and I think R&B, the definition of R&B is feel good. So I'm really grateful that as a society, R&B is appreciated more because when there are wars and evil and chaos and hate and all of the craziness that's happening in our nation and outside of our nation, I don't think people wanna hear about, you know, people getting shot, and I'm gonna jump you. We don't have the capacity. So I think people are like, it's nice to just talk about love, to hear about love, to talk about being cared for. I'm happy to play my role in that.
All of my peers, everybody that's in the R&B space right now, they're all my peers. So I'm just really happy, and I take pride in playing a role in that. The first group that came to mind is FLO. They are on my album. I'm always going to be a fan of everything that they do. My prayer is to continue collaborating with people that I'm a fan of. I think their contribution to R&B is something I really enjoy watching.
EMEM IKPOT: Are there artists you’re looking to collaborate with in the future?
JOSH LEVI: I would love to collaborate with Drake. I also love HER. Brandy, of course. Kehlani would be fire, that’s my girl.
EMEM IKPOT: Tell us a bit more about your work with Issa Rae’s Raedio label in partnership with Atlantic Records— how has this experience been for you in terms of your creative process, strategy, and album curation?
JOSH LEVI: Issa Rae, Issa Rae. What an icon. What a boss. All I think of, every time I look at her face, is lu're just a boss, and I really want to be like you. She's an amazing creative. I think my favorite thing about Issa, which I always talk about, is that she truly trusts the people that she aligns with. I've never once had a conversation with Issa where she tried to change my vision. She's only ever pushed me to lean more into my vision. And I think that's my favorite part of collaborating with her. And then specifically for this album, she just wanted to constantly be involved in my thought process, not to really add or take away from where I was at, but to stay close to what my goals were. And that's another thing I really appreciate about her. From day one, we listened to every track, and we talked about the meaning and the intention behind each record. We’ll go on random dinners, and she will ask me what my goals are, what I would like to do, and the things I would like to invest in my fans. The ways I'd like to continue to cultivate and facilitate a club Levi Space, in the world. She was at my LA show during the tour, screaming in the balcony. She's so supportive of everything that I would like to go after. She's there to be like, "Okay, let's figure out how we do this."
EMEM IKPOT: Yeah, she really is a true force of nature.
JOSH LEVI: Force is a great word.
EMEM IKPOT: What was your experience like working on Turning Red? Those vocals are crazy. They still live in my head rent-free!
JOSH LEVI: Hahaha, Thank you! That whole experience was unexpected. Billie Eilish and Phineas did all of the music for that film, so they had me in mind as a member of Four Town, and it just came across my table—and it was an immediate yes. I'm the biggest Pixar fan. My favorite movies of all time are animated, one of which is the Incredibles, which is another Pixar film. I was just like, what? I get to voice a character with brown skin who can sing soulfully? In the Pixar Zeitgeist World? Absolutely, yes. That was a really dope experience. We recorded everything at Disney studios, and it was dope. It was really, really special. It’s very interesting the different places where people join the Josh party. Some people just joined the party through Hydraulic, some people through my song on Insecure, then the most random stuff, like, just random YouTube videos, and then there's a group of people that’s like–so I found you through Turning Red and I've been locked in with you ever since!
EMEM IKPOT: There’s a massive difference between opening for someone and being the person the entire room is there to see. What was this experience like on tour?
JOSH LEVI: I mean, you said it best, like, when you're opening, the energy is —let me bring people into my world for, like, 15 to 20 minutes. There may be some fans of Josh out there, but my primary job is to make everybody feel what I’m feeling for the next 15 minutes, and then they can go on to the person that they really came here for. For the Hydraulic tour, the Josh Levi experience, it was completely different. It's my sole responsibility to facilitate an experience for all the people who spent their time driving to, flying to, or taking the train to my show. To really cultivate a night that has my name on it. And that's something that I take a lot of pride and responsibility in. I feel responsible for the whole experience.
So it's different, you know? There's a different level of commitment, passion, and a mantle that I feel like I have. It was really special for me, you know, walking out on those stages and seeing a packed room, seeing a sold-out room. Not something I take for granted at all. I had people flying from Shanghai, five, six, seven, even eight hours away. This was an 11-city tour. I didn't do as many dates as I will in the future. So a lot of my fans were traveling to see me, but then it being me, you know, on the ticket, that's a different level of like…I can't lean on anybody else.
EMEM IKPOT: Your album aesthetic is so distinct — from the leather, the textures, the "Rodeo" imagery. How challenging was it to translate that high-fashion, cinematic world into a live touring environment where you have to balance your look with the raw athleticism of your choreography?
JOSH LEVI: I love this question. So Hydraulic has a gritty, auto body, Pimp My Ride, Fast and Furious energy to it. The alter ego in this album is a car mechanic. The car mechanic represents Mr. Hydraulic, the mechanic who's constantly doing repairs and maintenance on my heart, my mind, and my well-being. To stay functioning as this well-oiled machine throughout my life experiences and the craziness of the world, the mechanic is steadily working. I really wanted to commit to this concept throughout the album, while also bringing it to life on tour, which is why a lot of the fashion was between moto auto body stuff to actual mechanic jumpsuits, where I had like, literal dirt on my face, my arms, and on some of my shirts, to really commit to the story. That's what inspired the fashion story of the album. And also, the spirit of Texas in Houston was a source of inspiration. It's always combining, you know, the grills and the sideways hats and some of the silhouettes of Houston culture and sweat and mixing it with these auto body worlds that represented the narrative of the album.
EMEM IKPOT: Now that the tour is officially over, what's the one thing you've learned from this run that you want to carry into the next one? Is there something you saw that the fans reacted to, or maybe something you felt that you want to really implement in your next tour? What's next for you?
JOSH LEVI: This tour showed me so much. First, they want way more merch from me than I thought, that's one. I think building my world in terms of fashion and merchandise is something that I'm excited to lean into, which is something I've always wanted to do. And then sonically, my fans like high-energy stuff. I've always been the guy who brought energy to R&B. That's important to me. And this story showed me that I should continue that, even though it makes for a very tiring set. It's quite the exercise, but I see that my fans want nothing less than that. That's been dope. What's next for me is Hydraulic, Deluxe. More shows, I'm coming to Europe. A few festivals this summer and collaborations. I think this tour showed me something that my fans have already told me, which they also tell me every day. They tell me that there is a place for my sound and there's a place for my music. And of course, I believe that, but seeing them, seeing a room full of people screaming the songs, knowing every single word. It just hits different. It really energized me to continue to lean into as much Josh Levi as I can and less of the outside voices of who people think I should be. I’ve learned to lean into myself and trust my instinct, which was really educational for me. And I'll never get the picture of the faces of the Levi legends out of my brain. The joy and the love of singing word for word into their eyes. That's a feeling that I am taking with me in the studio every day. It's been so inspiring. I'm keeping that spirit in the music. As an artist, these are the moments that you live for. You can't pay for those moments.
Emem-Esther U. Ikpot
@ememIK46
(Instagram/Substack/ememikpot.com)
The Met Gala has always sold fantasy. Every first Monday in May, fashion’s most powerful names climb those museum steps dressed as references, rebellions, and walking mood boards, each look carefully engineered to dominate headlines. By morning, best-dressed roundups, reaction memes, and zoomed-in carpet shots have already decided who “understood the assignment” and who didn’t. But while designers often take center stage in the conversation, there’s another layer of authorship hiding in plain sight–one that lives in skin prep, foundation mixes, perfectly placed shimmer, and the kind of glow that survives a hundred camera flashes. Before the dress, the fittings, the flashbulbs and the Vogue slideshows, there’s the canvas: the face.
And more often than not, some of the most unforgettable faces at the Met begin in the hands of Black beauty artists who understand not just makeup, but skin, light, texture, tone and presence. Artists who know that glam isn’t simply about looking expensive, but about looking remembered. For decades, Black makeup artists have quietly shaped the language of red carpet beauty, often without the same visibility as the celebrities or fashion houses they help elevate. But if the 2026 Met Gala proved anything, it’s that some of the night’s most defining beauty moments weren’t created under the spotlight. They were created long before it.
Among this year’s standouts was Ngozi Esther Edeme, better known as Painted by Esther, whose work on Tyla felt quietly magnetic. Nothing about the look screamed for attention, yet it was impossible to ignore. The skin was luminous without looking overworked, radiant without feeling artificial, and in many ways, that restraint became its power. For the Nigerian-born, UK-based artist, Edeme represents a generation of African beauty artists bringing a different kind of precision to global fashion spaces, one rooted not in trends, but in an intimate understanding of melanin. Her extensive portfolio also includes fan-favorites such as Naomi Campbell, Viola Davis, Olandria and more.
Artists like Edeme are walking through doors that artists like Sir John spent years forcing open. Through years of shaping Beyoncé’s Renaissance-era glow, Super Bowl glam, and countless red carpet moments, he has helped redefine what Black luxury beauty could look like on the world stage. His signature skin that breathes, glow that feels intentional, glamour that never over-explains itself, has become so embedded in modern celebrity beauty that it almost feels invisible. But influence often works like that. You stop noticing it because it’s everywhere.
That same poise showed up in Chelsea Uchenna’s work on longtime facebeat client Doechii, one of the freshest beauty moments of the night. Sharp liner, lifted skin, and a softly sculpted complexion gave the rapper a look that felt equal parts futuristic and unmistakably her. There was structure, edge, and just enough attitude to keep the look from feeling safe. Uchenna understands that the best makeup doesn’t erase personality–it amplifies it. In a space where image can sometimes overpower individuality, her work made sure the woman behind the glam never disappeared.
Afro-Latino artist Hector Espinal approached beauty from another angle entirely, helping create one of the evening’s most sculptural celebrity faces with Rihanna. Metallic finishes, dimension, controlled drama–Espinal’s work felt less like makeup and more like visual storytelling. His artistry sits at the intersection of editorial beauty and cultural identity, proving that Black beauty doesn’t belong to one geography or one aesthetic. It keeps evolving and reinventing itself.
When Sheika Daley got her hands on Anok Yai ahead of this year’s Met, the result was iconographic as per usual. The 2025 Model of the Year arrived as a modern Black Madonna–her skin bronzed to near-sculptural perfection, cheekbones lifted with almost architectural precision, and eyes framed in soft metallic tones that caught the light like gilded artwork. Against Balenciaga’s dramatic hooded silhouette, Daley’s beauty direction didn’t simply complement the fashion–it deepened the story, turning Yai into something between fashion muse and living sculpture.
For Harold James, whose work on Laura Harrier delivered one of the evening’s most quietly sophisticated beauty moments. Harrier’s skin looked almost glass-like under the flash; fresh, breathable, impossibly even, while softly defined eyes and a muted lip kept the look feeling effortless rather than overworked. Against the drama of the Met carpet, James chose restraint over excess, proving once again that sometimes the most memorable beauty doesn’t always have to be the loudest in the room.
If anyone understands how to make elegance feel cinematic, it’s D’Andre Michael. For Angela Bassett’s 2026 Met appearance, Michael used makeup to tie the entire look together, drawing inspiration from Laura Wheeler Waring’s 1927 portrait Girl in a Pink Dress. With luminous skin, softly sculpted contours, flushed pink tones across the eyes and cheeks, and subtle touches of gold, Bassett looked less red carpet-ready and more like a living portrait. Nothing felt excessive–just polished, intentional, and a beautiful look that completed the story as powerfully as the gown itself.
Ultimately, in a room built to celebrate fashion as art, perhaps it’s only fitting that some of the night’s most powerful masterpieces were never stitched, draped, or tailored at all. They were blended, sculpted, softened, bronzed, and brought to life by artists who understood that sometimes the most unforgettable part of the look is what’s staring back at you.
For years, Afrobeats has travelled globally as a relatively unified cultural export. With sounds rhythmic, vibrant, and immediately recognisable, rooted in dance music, movement, optimism, and charisma. As artists experiment with different influences, Afrobeats remained a recognisable centre to what the world understood as a polished but collective image of African cool.
However, something has changed in the Nigerian pop culture over the last few decades, and it is recognisable. Its biggest stars no longer sound alike, market themselves alike, or even emotionally represent Africa in the same way. The rise of Asake, Rema and Tems suggests that Nigerian music is entering a new phase where artists are no longer giving the same version of African identity to the world. This is not the collapse of Afrobeats. It’s the fragmentation which may be the clearest indicator that Nigerian pop culture is maturing.
For a long time, African artists have been expected to function as cultural representatives before they could exist as individuals. Global success often came with the burden of how their music had to “introduce” Africa to the world in ways that their international audience could understand comfortably. The pressure to remain recognisably African while sounding globally accessible shone brightly, which is why they had to conform because the industry rewarded familiarity.
The new generation of Nigerian artists is beginning to erase and reject that collective responsibility. They are onto building distinct artistic worlds instead.
Rema is one of the artists who barely behaves as if he is interested in preserving traditional ideas for the African market. His music draws inspiration from Afrobeats, trap, futuristic pop production and internet-age, chaos all at once. Visually, he operates less like a traditional Popstar and more like a digitally assembled global youth figure with his Gothic styling, anime reference, rebellious unpredictability and emotionally unstable aesthetics.
What Rema makes important is not his commercial success. It is what his success represents culturally. He signals the arrival of a Nigerian artist who is no longer interested in explaining Africa to the world. His music asks to be consumed on its own terms.
The confidence marks a shift. Earlier generations of Nigerian stars often presented Africanness as a collective identity. Rema presents identity as fluid, fragmented and personal. His music does not ask to be interpreted through the lens of “African authenticity”. It asks to be consumed as culture on its own terms. In many ways, he represents the internetification of Nigerian pop culture, an era where artists are shaped as much by online subculture as they are by local musical traditions. And there is Asake, who appears to move in a completely different direction.
Where Rema feels culturally borderless, Asake feels aggressively rooted, and he explores it. His music is packed with Yoruba slang, Fuji cadences, street spirituality and local textures that would once have been considered too culturally specific for mainstream global crossover. Yet it travels anyway.
This is what makes Asake important. For years, there was an unspoken assumption that global success required dilution, where African artists could succeed internationally, but only after softening the local edges of their sound. However, Asake’s rise disrupts this logic completely. Instead of reducing cultural specificity, he intensifies it. Quietly, it has been proven that as he doubles down on local language, rhythm and identity, the audience across the world is willing to engage with Nigerian music without demanding translation first. This matters as it reflects a broader cultural power shift.
Tems represents the most radical of all. Unlike older expectations placed on African stars, Tems does not perform exuberance for a global audience. Her music is restrained, atmospheric and emotionally inward. She comes through feelings rather than spectacle. Even her vocal delivery resists excess.
What Tems exports is not just sound but mood. This distinction reveals how pop culture is becoming increasingly individualistic. Tems operate from introspection. Her artistry is rooted in solitude, vulnerability and emotional ambiguity. She is not trying to embody a continent; she is trying to express herself. And the global audience is responding to that, honestly.
Together, Rema, Asake and Tems reveal a setting larger than musical diversity. They reveal the collapse of a singular African pop identity. This may sound alarming to people invested in preserving Afrobeats as a stable cultural category, but it is a sign of creative expansion. Mature cultural industries do not produce one aesthetic language forever; instead, they diversify and create subcultures, contradictions and competing artistic identities. American pop music does not sound one way, nor does Latin or K-pop, which are increasingly fragmented. Nigerian music would inevitably reach this point.
This is why conversations about Nigerian music often feel confused right now. The category itself is struggling to contain the reality of what Nigerian artists are becoming. The confusion, however, is necessary because Nigerian pop culture is not a singular sound.
The fragmentation of Afrobeats should not be mistaken for weakness. It is evidence that the culture is becoming expansive enough to contain multiple selves at once. Nigerian music is no longer exporting one African identity to the world. It is exporting individuals.
IG: anuhola_
A group of teachers pulled Josh Levi aside one day from the rest of the class. Mortified, scared, and mostly confused, Josh reluctantly obliged, anxiously waiting to see how much trouble he was in. What exactly did they want? He wasn’t even the troublemaker type.
“Josh, can you sing that song that you were singing in the hallway?” they said excitedly.
Surprised and honored, Josh was relieved. He wasn’t in trouble. He landed at the genesis of the innate power music would hold in his life.
“I was so young, and I was confused at first, but I recognized at that moment that God gave me a gift that could make people feel something. From that point on, I was obsessed and addicted to the opportunity to make people feel.” – Josh Levi
Deeds Magazine sat down with actor, singer, performer, and multihyphenate Josh Levi to learn more about his music, tour, and his creative journey within the industry.
EMEM IKPOT: I’m super interested in learning more about your sound, specifically the R&B sonic textures for Hydraulic. Now that you’ve performed these songs on tour, has the energy of your shows influenced how you want your next project to sound, or did it just confirm you’re on the right path sonically?
JOSH LEVI: It more so confirmed that I want to stay in the energy that I'm on. I only ever create music that I’m excited to perform. That's how I know that I like a song, or that I like what I'm creating—if I can see myself performing it. If I visualize myself on stage, if I can see the music video– that's how I know I'm connecting with the music. And with this tour, it blew me away that I could bring to life the energy the fans gave me. This was exactly what I was going for.
EMEM IKPOT: Are there certain songs that you absolutely loved performing on tour, and are there ones that were more difficult, maybe emotionally?
JOSH LEVI: 1000%. Every song is completely different for me. I have some songs that are like, super fun and easy to escape to and just let go. Songs like Crash Out, and Don't Go. I really enjoy performing. NAMEONIT on my album is also really fun and upbeat. Other records are more vulnerable, where I do have to tap into something deeper. Songs like I Can't Go Outside, take me back to the very vulnerable and intimate place where I was when I was writing it. And then with How It's Supposed To Be, after finishing that song, I had to take a moment of silence during the performance. My fans just stared at me, but I was really fine with it. It takes me there every single time.
EMEM IKPOT: From your earlier records DISC 1, to DISC 2, all the way to Hydraulic, what was your experience like working on each of these records–in terms of your process, inspiration, collaboration? Has your process changed over time?
JOSH LEVI:Disc 1 and Disc 2 were both EPs. With Hydraulic, it had much more internal reflection. I dug super deep within myself. Not that I didn't dig deep with my EPs, but for Hydraulic, that's the most introspective work I've ever approached, because I was super passionate about bringing young Josh, who started out in music in Houston, Texas—the nine-year-old—to the party. My first experiences of music, my first relationship with music, I wanted to include that version of Josh as well. And so for Hydraulic, I meditated and prayed so much to really bridge those two versions of myself, the current Josh and the Josh where it all began. I think that's why, for me, the music on Hydraulic and the records on that project feel like they hold a lot more weight than my other EPs. Not to say that it's any better or less, it's just deeper.
EMEM IKPOT: It's interesting, because I feel like a lot of times, especially as a creative in the space, when you think about that original moment where you knew that you wanted to do something big, creative, and new—you tend to be really young. And when you actually get to doing that thing, you’re much older, but that young version of yourself that brought you to where you are now still exists. Actively bringing that young version with you to where you are now feels like a full-circle moment where everything is coming together in a real way, like the culmination of it all. Cause when we’re really focused and really in the creative zone, it’s really easy to forget that young self. And it’s like, wait…I'm remembering that young Emem, or that young Josh, who loves this stuff, and I want to bring them with me in this moment, too.
JOSH LEVI: Yeah, it's hilarious because it's like, this album is definitely a conversation between my current self and young Josh.
How are things going?
Why are we doing this again?
Why is music the thing that we feel so passionate about?
How did we get here?
It was a lot of those conversations, but definitely a full-circle moment. A culmination of my journey to date. I think Hydraulic will always have a special place in my heart for that reason. I was also very passionate about creating a debut album that reflected me in such a massive way, because it is my first album. You can only really have one first album. If you've never listened to me before, or if you will never listen to me again— I really worked to have a strong sonic blueprint of the story of Josh Levi.
EMEM IKPOT: Tell me a bit more about your background and your growth in the music industry. I know you’ve done acting, singing, performing, etc.— what really drove you to music?
JOSH LEVI: Church. I started singing in church. I grew up in the church in Houston, Texas. Gospel music was a huge thing in my orbit and in my family. We would hear it in cars, radios, TV screens, soundtracks, etc—that's all I ever heard. And so the good thing about that is, I was privy to only incredible singing at all times. That's all my ears heard. I was in so many local church communities, like the choir, and a bunch of other local stuff in Houston. I always tell the story: I remember singing in the hallway or in the bathroom at my elementary school, and my teachers pulled me into the principal's office with a bunch of the staff. I thought I was in trouble. They’re like, “Josh, can you sing that song that you were singing in the hallway?” And I was like, okay. Sure. I'll never forget how emotional they were as I was singing. It was some gospel song. I wish I could remember which song it was. I was so young, and I was confused at first, but I recognized at that moment that God gave me a gift that could make people feel something. From that point on, I was obsessed and addicted to the opportunity to make people feel.
EMEM IKPOT: I did a piece on D'Angelo, underscoring how important the Black church was for him and his music. And I feel like for a lot of artists, especially Black artists, the church is really such a strong fixture and source of inspiration. I think about this a lot now, in terms of artists who don't have that background and how it can impact their sonic sensibility or how they approach music. I think the Black church really does hold a very special place in crafting music.
JOSH LEVI: Yeah, musically, it's unmatched, and I think church, gospel, sound, and music are very divine. There's an anointing and a flow there that makes for a really, really special foundation for all music. I think gospel music is influential in every single genre. It is soulful. It is R&B. It is pop. It is even hip-hop. The stuff I grew up with, from Kirk Franklin, Israel Houghton, and Mary Mary, and even the traditional gospel sound still had 808s and high hats. I personally feel very grateful for having that church background because I only ever heard amazing quality vocals. Amazing quality music– band, instruments, and incredible sound in my ears. I got accustomed to that.
EMEM IKPOT: What musicians do you look up to as an artist— are there artists that inspire your sound?
JOSH LEVI: I'm inspired by so many people. Michael Jackson, Aaliyah, Beyoncé. Drake. Tems is a huge inspiration for me. I love Afrobeats, African music in general.
I'm inspired by a spectrum of so much. I mentioned gospel, I listen to French music. I also am a huge hip hop head, but like, a specific lane of hip hop, not necessarily contemporary today, but Future, Wayne, Drake. Travis Scott. On the singing side, I like artists who are anti the system—artists that push the boundaries, that go against the status quo — those people have always spoken to me.
EMEM IKPOT: How do you feel about the R&B landscape at this current moment?
JOSH LEVI: I think R&B is in a beautiful place. The window is finally opening for the true impact of R&B. For so long, R&B has kind of been dismissed in terms of its impact and its influence. But right now, in terms of where we're at in the world, people want to feel good, and I think R&B, the definition of R&B is feel good. So I'm really grateful that as a society, R&B is appreciated more because when there are wars and evil and chaos and hate and all of the craziness that's happening in our nation and outside of our nation, I don't think people wanna hear about, you know, people getting shot, and I'm gonna jump you. We don't have the capacity. So I think people are like, it's nice to just talk about love, to hear about love, to talk about being cared for. I'm happy to play my role in that.
All of my peers, everybody that's in the R&B space right now, they're all my peers. So I'm just really happy, and I take pride in playing a role in that. The first group that came to mind is FLO. They are on my album. I'm always going to be a fan of everything that they do. My prayer is to continue collaborating with people that I'm a fan of. I think their contribution to R&B is something I really enjoy watching.
EMEM IKPOT: Are there artists you’re looking to collaborate with in the future?
JOSH LEVI: I would love to collaborate with Drake. I also love HER. Brandy, of course. Kehlani would be fire, that’s my girl.
EMEM IKPOT: Tell us a bit more about your work with Issa Rae’s Raedio label in partnership with Atlantic Records— how has this experience been for you in terms of your creative process, strategy, and album curation?
JOSH LEVI: Issa Rae, Issa Rae. What an icon. What a boss. All I think of, every time I look at her face, is lu're just a boss, and I really want to be like you. She's an amazing creative. I think my favorite thing about Issa, which I always talk about, is that she truly trusts the people that she aligns with. I've never once had a conversation with Issa where she tried to change my vision. She's only ever pushed me to lean more into my vision. And I think that's my favorite part of collaborating with her. And then specifically for this album, she just wanted to constantly be involved in my thought process, not to really add or take away from where I was at, but to stay close to what my goals were. And that's another thing I really appreciate about her. From day one, we listened to every track, and we talked about the meaning and the intention behind each record. We’ll go on random dinners, and she will ask me what my goals are, what I would like to do, and the things I would like to invest in my fans. The ways I'd like to continue to cultivate and facilitate a club Levi Space, in the world. She was at my LA show during the tour, screaming in the balcony. She's so supportive of everything that I would like to go after. She's there to be like, "Okay, let's figure out how we do this."
EMEM IKPOT: Yeah, she really is a true force of nature.
JOSH LEVI: Force is a great word.
EMEM IKPOT: What was your experience like working on Turning Red? Those vocals are crazy. They still live in my head rent-free!
JOSH LEVI: Hahaha, Thank you! That whole experience was unexpected. Billie Eilish and Phineas did all of the music for that film, so they had me in mind as a member of Four Town, and it just came across my table—and it was an immediate yes. I'm the biggest Pixar fan. My favorite movies of all time are animated, one of which is the Incredibles, which is another Pixar film. I was just like, what? I get to voice a character with brown skin who can sing soulfully? In the Pixar Zeitgeist World? Absolutely, yes. That was a really dope experience. We recorded everything at Disney studios, and it was dope. It was really, really special. It’s very interesting the different places where people join the Josh party. Some people just joined the party through Hydraulic, some people through my song on Insecure, then the most random stuff, like, just random YouTube videos, and then there's a group of people that’s like–so I found you through Turning Red and I've been locked in with you ever since!
EMEM IKPOT: There’s a massive difference between opening for someone and being the person the entire room is there to see. What was this experience like on tour?
JOSH LEVI: I mean, you said it best, like, when you're opening, the energy is —let me bring people into my world for, like, 15 to 20 minutes. There may be some fans of Josh out there, but my primary job is to make everybody feel what I’m feeling for the next 15 minutes, and then they can go on to the person that they really came here for. For the Hydraulic tour, the Josh Levi experience, it was completely different. It's my sole responsibility to facilitate an experience for all the people who spent their time driving to, flying to, or taking the train to my show. To really cultivate a night that has my name on it. And that's something that I take a lot of pride and responsibility in. I feel responsible for the whole experience.
So it's different, you know? There's a different level of commitment, passion, and a mantle that I feel like I have. It was really special for me, you know, walking out on those stages and seeing a packed room, seeing a sold-out room. Not something I take for granted at all. I had people flying from Shanghai, five, six, seven, even eight hours away. This was an 11-city tour. I didn't do as many dates as I will in the future. So a lot of my fans were traveling to see me, but then it being me, you know, on the ticket, that's a different level of like…I can't lean on anybody else.
EMEM IKPOT: Your album aesthetic is so distinct — from the leather, the textures, the "Rodeo" imagery. How challenging was it to translate that high-fashion, cinematic world into a live touring environment where you have to balance your look with the raw athleticism of your choreography?
JOSH LEVI: I love this question. So Hydraulic has a gritty, auto body, Pimp My Ride, Fast and Furious energy to it. The alter ego in this album is a car mechanic. The car mechanic represents Mr. Hydraulic, the mechanic who's constantly doing repairs and maintenance on my heart, my mind, and my well-being. To stay functioning as this well-oiled machine throughout my life experiences and the craziness of the world, the mechanic is steadily working. I really wanted to commit to this concept throughout the album, while also bringing it to life on tour, which is why a lot of the fashion was between moto auto body stuff to actual mechanic jumpsuits, where I had like, literal dirt on my face, my arms, and on some of my shirts, to really commit to the story. That's what inspired the fashion story of the album. And also, the spirit of Texas in Houston was a source of inspiration. It's always combining, you know, the grills and the sideways hats and some of the silhouettes of Houston culture and sweat and mixing it with these auto body worlds that represented the narrative of the album.
EMEM IKPOT: Now that the tour is officially over, what's the one thing you've learned from this run that you want to carry into the next one? Is there something you saw that the fans reacted to, or maybe something you felt that you want to really implement in your next tour? What's next for you?
JOSH LEVI: This tour showed me so much. First, they want way more merch from me than I thought, that's one. I think building my world in terms of fashion and merchandise is something that I'm excited to lean into, which is something I've always wanted to do. And then sonically, my fans like high-energy stuff. I've always been the guy who brought energy to R&B. That's important to me. And this story showed me that I should continue that, even though it makes for a very tiring set. It's quite the exercise, but I see that my fans want nothing less than that. That's been dope. What's next for me is Hydraulic, Deluxe. More shows, I'm coming to Europe. A few festivals this summer and collaborations. I think this tour showed me something that my fans have already told me, which they also tell me every day. They tell me that there is a place for my sound and there's a place for my music. And of course, I believe that, but seeing them, seeing a room full of people screaming the songs, knowing every single word. It just hits different. It really energized me to continue to lean into as much Josh Levi as I can and less of the outside voices of who people think I should be. I’ve learned to lean into myself and trust my instinct, which was really educational for me. And I'll never get the picture of the faces of the Levi legends out of my brain. The joy and the love of singing word for word into their eyes. That's a feeling that I am taking with me in the studio every day. It's been so inspiring. I'm keeping that spirit in the music. As an artist, these are the moments that you live for. You can't pay for those moments.
Emem-Esther U. Ikpot
@ememIK46
(Instagram/Substack/ememikpot.com)
The Met Gala has always sold fantasy. Every first Monday in May, fashion’s most powerful names climb those museum steps dressed as references, rebellions, and walking mood boards, each look carefully engineered to dominate headlines. By morning, best-dressed roundups, reaction memes, and zoomed-in carpet shots have already decided who “understood the assignment” and who didn’t. But while designers often take center stage in the conversation, there’s another layer of authorship hiding in plain sight–one that lives in skin prep, foundation mixes, perfectly placed shimmer, and the kind of glow that survives a hundred camera flashes. Before the dress, the fittings, the flashbulbs and the Vogue slideshows, there’s the canvas: the face.
And more often than not, some of the most unforgettable faces at the Met begin in the hands of Black beauty artists who understand not just makeup, but skin, light, texture, tone and presence. Artists who know that glam isn’t simply about looking expensive, but about looking remembered. For decades, Black makeup artists have quietly shaped the language of red carpet beauty, often without the same visibility as the celebrities or fashion houses they help elevate. But if the 2026 Met Gala proved anything, it’s that some of the night’s most defining beauty moments weren’t created under the spotlight. They were created long before it.
Among this year’s standouts was Ngozi Esther Edeme, better known as Painted by Esther, whose work on Tyla felt quietly magnetic. Nothing about the look screamed for attention, yet it was impossible to ignore. The skin was luminous without looking overworked, radiant without feeling artificial, and in many ways, that restraint became its power. For the Nigerian-born, UK-based artist, Edeme represents a generation of African beauty artists bringing a different kind of precision to global fashion spaces, one rooted not in trends, but in an intimate understanding of melanin. Her extensive portfolio also includes fan-favorites such as Naomi Campbell, Viola Davis, Olandria and more.
Artists like Edeme are walking through doors that artists like Sir John spent years forcing open. Through years of shaping Beyoncé’s Renaissance-era glow, Super Bowl glam, and countless red carpet moments, he has helped redefine what Black luxury beauty could look like on the world stage. His signature skin that breathes, glow that feels intentional, glamour that never over-explains itself, has become so embedded in modern celebrity beauty that it almost feels invisible. But influence often works like that. You stop noticing it because it’s everywhere.
That same poise showed up in Chelsea Uchenna’s work on longtime facebeat client Doechii, one of the freshest beauty moments of the night. Sharp liner, lifted skin, and a softly sculpted complexion gave the rapper a look that felt equal parts futuristic and unmistakably her. There was structure, edge, and just enough attitude to keep the look from feeling safe. Uchenna understands that the best makeup doesn’t erase personality–it amplifies it. In a space where image can sometimes overpower individuality, her work made sure the woman behind the glam never disappeared.
Afro-Latino artist Hector Espinal approached beauty from another angle entirely, helping create one of the evening’s most sculptural celebrity faces with Rihanna. Metallic finishes, dimension, controlled drama–Espinal’s work felt less like makeup and more like visual storytelling. His artistry sits at the intersection of editorial beauty and cultural identity, proving that Black beauty doesn’t belong to one geography or one aesthetic. It keeps evolving and reinventing itself.
When Sheika Daley got her hands on Anok Yai ahead of this year’s Met, the result was iconographic as per usual. The 2025 Model of the Year arrived as a modern Black Madonna–her skin bronzed to near-sculptural perfection, cheekbones lifted with almost architectural precision, and eyes framed in soft metallic tones that caught the light like gilded artwork. Against Balenciaga’s dramatic hooded silhouette, Daley’s beauty direction didn’t simply complement the fashion–it deepened the story, turning Yai into something between fashion muse and living sculpture.
For Harold James, whose work on Laura Harrier delivered one of the evening’s most quietly sophisticated beauty moments. Harrier’s skin looked almost glass-like under the flash; fresh, breathable, impossibly even, while softly defined eyes and a muted lip kept the look feeling effortless rather than overworked. Against the drama of the Met carpet, James chose restraint over excess, proving once again that sometimes the most memorable beauty doesn’t always have to be the loudest in the room.
If anyone understands how to make elegance feel cinematic, it’s D’Andre Michael. For Angela Bassett’s 2026 Met appearance, Michael used makeup to tie the entire look together, drawing inspiration from Laura Wheeler Waring’s 1927 portrait Girl in a Pink Dress. With luminous skin, softly sculpted contours, flushed pink tones across the eyes and cheeks, and subtle touches of gold, Bassett looked less red carpet-ready and more like a living portrait. Nothing felt excessive–just polished, intentional, and a beautiful look that completed the story as powerfully as the gown itself.
Ultimately, in a room built to celebrate fashion as art, perhaps it’s only fitting that some of the night’s most powerful masterpieces were never stitched, draped, or tailored at all. They were blended, sculpted, softened, bronzed, and brought to life by artists who understood that sometimes the most unforgettable part of the look is what’s staring back at you.
For years, Afrobeats has travelled globally as a relatively unified cultural export. With sounds rhythmic, vibrant, and immediately recognisable, rooted in dance music, movement, optimism, and charisma. As artists experiment with different influences, Afrobeats remained a recognisable centre to what the world understood as a polished but collective image of African cool.
However, something has changed in the Nigerian pop culture over the last few decades, and it is recognisable. Its biggest stars no longer sound alike, market themselves alike, or even emotionally represent Africa in the same way. The rise of Asake, Rema and Tems suggests that Nigerian music is entering a new phase where artists are no longer giving the same version of African identity to the world. This is not the collapse of Afrobeats. It’s the fragmentation which may be the clearest indicator that Nigerian pop culture is maturing.
For a long time, African artists have been expected to function as cultural representatives before they could exist as individuals. Global success often came with the burden of how their music had to “introduce” Africa to the world in ways that their international audience could understand comfortably. The pressure to remain recognisably African while sounding globally accessible shone brightly, which is why they had to conform because the industry rewarded familiarity.
The new generation of Nigerian artists is beginning to erase and reject that collective responsibility. They are onto building distinct artistic worlds instead.
Rema is one of the artists who barely behaves as if he is interested in preserving traditional ideas for the African market. His music draws inspiration from Afrobeats, trap, futuristic pop production and internet-age, chaos all at once. Visually, he operates less like a traditional Popstar and more like a digitally assembled global youth figure with his Gothic styling, anime reference, rebellious unpredictability and emotionally unstable aesthetics.
What Rema makes important is not his commercial success. It is what his success represents culturally. He signals the arrival of a Nigerian artist who is no longer interested in explaining Africa to the world. His music asks to be consumed on its own terms.
The confidence marks a shift. Earlier generations of Nigerian stars often presented Africanness as a collective identity. Rema presents identity as fluid, fragmented and personal. His music does not ask to be interpreted through the lens of “African authenticity”. It asks to be consumed as culture on its own terms. In many ways, he represents the internetification of Nigerian pop culture, an era where artists are shaped as much by online subculture as they are by local musical traditions. And there is Asake, who appears to move in a completely different direction.
Where Rema feels culturally borderless, Asake feels aggressively rooted, and he explores it. His music is packed with Yoruba slang, Fuji cadences, street spirituality and local textures that would once have been considered too culturally specific for mainstream global crossover. Yet it travels anyway.
This is what makes Asake important. For years, there was an unspoken assumption that global success required dilution, where African artists could succeed internationally, but only after softening the local edges of their sound. However, Asake’s rise disrupts this logic completely. Instead of reducing cultural specificity, he intensifies it. Quietly, it has been proven that as he doubles down on local language, rhythm and identity, the audience across the world is willing to engage with Nigerian music without demanding translation first. This matters as it reflects a broader cultural power shift.
Tems represents the most radical of all. Unlike older expectations placed on African stars, Tems does not perform exuberance for a global audience. Her music is restrained, atmospheric and emotionally inward. She comes through feelings rather than spectacle. Even her vocal delivery resists excess.
What Tems exports is not just sound but mood. This distinction reveals how pop culture is becoming increasingly individualistic. Tems operate from introspection. Her artistry is rooted in solitude, vulnerability and emotional ambiguity. She is not trying to embody a continent; she is trying to express herself. And the global audience is responding to that, honestly.
Together, Rema, Asake and Tems reveal a setting larger than musical diversity. They reveal the collapse of a singular African pop identity. This may sound alarming to people invested in preserving Afrobeats as a stable cultural category, but it is a sign of creative expansion. Mature cultural industries do not produce one aesthetic language forever; instead, they diversify and create subcultures, contradictions and competing artistic identities. American pop music does not sound one way, nor does Latin or K-pop, which are increasingly fragmented. Nigerian music would inevitably reach this point.
This is why conversations about Nigerian music often feel confused right now. The category itself is struggling to contain the reality of what Nigerian artists are becoming. The confusion, however, is necessary because Nigerian pop culture is not a singular sound.
The fragmentation of Afrobeats should not be mistaken for weakness. It is evidence that the culture is becoming expansive enough to contain multiple selves at once. Nigerian music is no longer exporting one African identity to the world. It is exporting individuals.
IG: anuhola_
In a world where the voices of over 150m young people across the globe goes unheard, The Street Child World Cup aims to be a supportive platform. Established in 2010, The Street Child World Cup has over the years utilised the power of football to give street-connected young people a platform to speak directly to those in power and turn visibility into commitments that drive lasting change.
Using the momentum of the world’s biggest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, the Street Child World Cup transforms the way the world treats street-connected young people. The event serves as a vehicle for structured advocacy sessions, which are safe spaces for young people to share their experiences. The 2026 edition, which began on Wednesday 6th May, has been nothing short of electrifying with teams of street-connected young people travelling from across the world to take part, including Palestine, Germany, Kenya, Mexico Ikoots (Indigenous), and Brazil.
Hosted by Street Child United (SCU), the 2026 Street Child World Cup culminates in a North American Tour in cities including Mexico City, Seattle, Miami, Washington DC., New York, and Toronto before finishing at the UN in New York City.
“Years of preparation and excitement have led us to this moment,” John Wroe, CEO of Street Child United said. “SCU has been supported by multiple partners, sponsors and supporters. Pulling off a global event of this size is no mean feat, but I always say that the world conspires with us, and we have been overwhelmed with support every step of the way. “My thanks go to our partners Fútbol Más, who have been instrumental in bringing the tournament to fruition, and to the British Embassy in Mexico City, whose team have been incredibly supportive throughout.
The event is set to finish on Thursday 14th May with the General Assembly, during which the participants discuss and document their demands of those in power. They then take these demands back to their home countries in order to campaign for change. Sponsors of the 2026 Street Child World Cup include Bank of America, Government of Mexico – IMSS, Lenovo, and the Embassy of Canada.’
Where society has shone its light primarily on the West, East Africa has grown into itself, away from the pressures to perform and fit a mold. One country from the region known prominently by its unique landscapes that attract eager tourists and for its long-distance athletic prowess, has caught eyes globally - infiltrating sport, fashion, art, and music. Kenya, one of the leading economies in the recent renaissance of the continent, is making itself known among the nations as, dare I say, the country of the moment.
But it’s not just me saying it. While those domestically may have paid Kenya its dues, the world has only begun to. The world watches this week as Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, hosts the Africa Forward Summit - garnering the attention of Western and domestic forces alike. Notably, French President Emmanuel Macron’s attention has been turned to the East - after a struggle to rewrite narratives in the West - reaching new economic investment terms within Kenya for progress across Africa.
However, while the summit tackles economic, industrial, and security infrastructure and growth, it ignores the knock of a rapidly expanding creative economy across Africa and its diaspora. A crusade long led by West Africa has been taken over by the East in style, boasting its steady share of star power and sending a wake-up call heard from miles away.
Though not often known for its dominance in team sports, Kenya’s Rugby Sevens Team is having their say in the HSBC SVNS Series. One of two African nations in the tournament, the Shujaa have reached the championship, with the next leg being played in Valladolid, Spain, on the 29th of May 2026.
The country’s other athletic achievements have been marked by consistent moments of individual brilliance, from the United States to the United Kingdom. In April, the NFL signed rugby player Joshua Weru to the Philadelphia Eagles during the 2026 draft, following the recent trend of rugby athletes moving to the NFL. In basketball, Madina Okot made history as the first Kenyan to be drafted in the first round of the WNBA. Picked 13th overall, her height and conversion in the paint are set to light up Atlanta in the upcoming season.
Across the pond, Sebastian Sawe’s world-record and marathon-record-breaking run at the London Marathon continued Kenya’s long-standing reign as the superhuman royalty of long-distance running.
Across the pond, Sebastian Sawe’s world-record and marathon-record-breaking run at the London Marathon continued Kenya’s long-standing reign as the superhuman royalty of long-distance running.
In fashion, the evolution of cross-continental export and consumer demand for sustainability has turned the odds in the East’s favour. Major fashion houses, like Vivienne Westwood, have released campaigns documenting behind-the-scenes looks at their production teams based in Kenya - turning the conversation to the talented craftsmen, women, and artisans behind their Made in Kenya line.
Homegrown designer and founder, Anil Padia, has kept an eye on Africa’s capital after being named a LVMH Prize finalist earlier this month. The first East African to achieve such a feat, Padia’s Nairobi and Paris-based womenswear brand Yoshita 1967 honours his Indian-Kenyan roots with refined intention and hand-made craftsmanship, joining an accomplished catalogue of African couturiers to be nominated.
With the same reverence to culture and craftsmanship in mind, painter Michael Armitage draws from his upbringing in Kenya. Using the country’s political instability, violence, loss and migration as subjects, his exhibition The Promise of Change at the Venice Biennale has brought the country and its region into the craft’s cultural exchange.
With the same reverence to culture and craftsmanship in mind, painter Michael Armitage draws from his upbringing in Kenya. Using the country’s political instability, violence, loss and migration as subjects, his exhibition The Promise of Change at the Venice Biennale has brought the country and its region into the craft’s cultural exchange.
His work was amongst a new wave of East African artists bringing the region’s history and culture to the artistic eye on a global scale. Preceding the East Africa Art Biennale and the His work was amongst a new wave of East African artists bringing the region’s history and culture to the artistic eye on a global scale. Preceding the East Africa Art Biennale and the Pan African Biennale of Architecture, both hosted in Nairobi later this year, Armitage and his colleagues are harbingers of promising creative clues into Africa’s next big region.
Music powerhouse, Bien-Aime Baraka, has become the first solo Kenyan artist to headline at AfroNation in Portugal this July, after previously performing solo and headlining as a member of Sauti Sol, the first Kenyan group to grace the festival’s stage.
Alongside him, Uganda’s Joshua Baraka from Uganda has made waves in the region and internationally, set to be the first Ugandan headliner to ever perform at the Afrobeats’ biggest weekend. The rise of arban, gengetone, and Afro-fusion music within the country has also begun a change in tune throughout the region and around the globe, turning ears and eyes to Kenya’s music scene.
Already, the tables have turned, and the ripples felt through Kenya’s foundational years have left the first quarter of 2026 too powerful to ignore. As the triumphs bleed into the second, what the rest of the year holds is awaited on bated breath - making the world watch and wait. Perhaps, the new question is: What else will the world find, should they continue to stay awake?
Ben P is waiting. His artist SINYM is late to the studio - phone calls answered but with excuses, the beat sitting ready on the speakers with nobody to record it. Three episodes in, and the internet recognised the joke immediately. Ben P is BNXN. SINYM is Sarz. The roles are reversed. And somehow that reversal is the most incredible way to release ‘The Game Needs Us’ after a single track had already been heard.
Sarz is not simply a producer. He is an architect. ‘Gwagwalada’ with BNXN. ‘Nzaza’ and ‘Feelings’ with Lojay on ‘LV N ATTN’ - the benchmark for producer-artist chemistry in Nigerian music. ‘Protect Sarz At All Costs’, his debut album, was a declaration of creative identity that the industry was not entirely ready for. Across every era of contemporary Afrobeats, Sarz has been in the room -often the most important person in it. BNXN is the other side of that equation. Grammy-nominated, coming off CAPTAIN, one of the most precise songwriters in Afrofusion - a vocalist who understands production well enough to play Ben P convincingly for three episodes of a social show. It is the product of years spent paying attention to the people making the music underneath him.
Two people at the peak of their individual crafts. One EP. Five tracks entirely produced by Sarz. Released via EMPIRE, the project expands on the duo’s celebrated chemistry following previous releases including ‘Gwagwalada’ and ‘Pidgin & English’, combining Afrofusion, Afrobeats, and contemporary pop influences.
‘Rum & Soda’ opens the EP where it finds its footing - melodic, easy, the kind of song that doesn’t ask for your attention but gets it anyway. ‘Back Outside’ follows with a different kind of weight. The lead single debuted at number one on Apple Music Nigeria, accumulating more than 22 million streams and two million video views in two weeks. But the number is only part of the story. What makes the track significant is what BNXN chose to build it around - an interpolation of Amadou & Mariam’s ‘Ko Neye Mounka Allah La’, taken from the legendary Malian duo’s 1990 album, sung in Bambara. The phrase translates roughly to “what God has given.” Underneath a song about returning to the spotlight after lying low, that choice is not decorative. It is a declaration that what he has was given, that the roots of this music run deeper than any chart position, and that coming back outside means something more than a release date.
‘Emotional High’ sits in that particular mood of wanting something you’re already in the middle of having. The production keeps delivering, and you keep wanting more of it - the most quietly greedy track on the EP. ‘Frank Sinatra’ closes on the most introspective note, a quiet and considered ending for a project that could easily have gone louder.
‘The Game Needs Us’ sits in the same territory as ‘I Love Girls with Trouble’ - not in sound, but in what it feels like to listen to two people who genuinely understand each other’s instincts. BNXN said: “This project brings together two of Nigeria’s greatest forces to deliver a refreshing yet reflective experience. To show the dynamics in the African sound and to give a feel of where the future of the sound is headed.” Billboard Africa put it more plainly: the EP feels less like a reunion and more like a reminder of what happens when two architects of the sound lock back in.
BNXN and Sarz put the most honest thing about the Nigerian music industry into a social show, then backed it with five tracks that prove why both sides of that dynamic matter. The game needs a producer. The game needs the artist.
After more than a decade away from the global fashion circuit, Rio Fashion Week 2026 returned this April with something to prove. Staged across Pier Mauá and some of Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic cultural landmarks, the revived week was not interested in nostalgia or resurrection for resurrection’s sake. Instead, the relaunch positioned Rio as a city reclaiming its authority within Brazilian fashion as a site where culture, nightlife, politics, movement, and craftsmanship collide in ways impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Officially backed through a partnership between the Rio de Janeiro municipality and IMM, the company behind São Paulo Fashion Week, the week drew around 30,000 attendees and folded runway shows into talks, exhibitions, nightlife programming, and industry conversations.
What emerged over the course of Fashion Week was a portrait of Brazilian fashion at its most expansive. Across the runways, designers interrogated sensuality, ritual, class, race, performance, and national identity without flattening themselves into tropical cliché. There was an understanding throughout the week that Brazilian fashion is often consumed internationally through narrow visual codes, like swimwear, colour, carnival, and many of the strongest collections pushed against those assumptions while still remaining deeply rooted in place.
Among the clearest standouts was Misci, whose show unfolded at the Marquês de Sapucaí, the spiritual home of Rio’s Carnival parades. Creative director Airon Martin built the collection around a deceptively simple question: what happens when Carnival stops being an annual event and instead becomes a permanent state of existence? Titled Tropical Escapism, the collection moved between fantasy and exhaustion, spectacle and intimacy. Models walked to the live percussion of Beija-Flor de Nilópolis’ drum section, transforming the runway into something closer to a procession than a traditional catwalk.
What made the collection resonate wasn’t simply its theatricality, but the way movement itself became the central design language. Garments slipped between fluid jersey, elongated tailoring, soft draping, and sculptural pieces that never quite settled into rigidity. There were echoes of 1970s Brazilian counterculture throughout, particularly the liberated sensuality associated with Gal Costa, but Martin resisted pure nostalgia. Instead, the collection captured Rio as a city constantly in motion: bodies dancing through heat, music leaking into the street, glamour collapsing into sweat by sunrise. Jewellery by Alan Crocetti sharpened the collection, ornamenting the body without overpowering it. Misci undoubtedly understands that Brazilian luxury today is less about polish and more about atmosphere, identity, and emotional texture.
If Misci explored celebration as a cultural language, Dendezeiro approached performance through the lens of subculture. Designers Hisan Silva and Pedro Batalha pulled ballroom aesthetics out of their expected framework and reinterpreted them through Brazilian social realities, particularly funk carioca and pagode baiano. The result was one of the week’s most charged collections: hyper-fitted silhouettes, exposed skin, latex, leather, sharply controlled proportions, and a physicality that felt unapologetically confrontational.
What could have easily collapsed into stylised reference instead felt lived-in and participatory. Dendezeiro’s strength lies in how the brand understands ballroom not just as an aesthetic vocabulary but as survival language and a system of self-fashioning tied to performance, resistance, race, queerness, and aspiration. With Alton Mason closing the show, it felt particularly aligned with the collection’s wider interest in global Black performance cultures and the circulation of identity across borders. Dendezeiro continues to occupy a rare space in fashion that is politically aware without becoming didactic, and sensual.
One of the more conceptually rigorous presentations came from Argalji, the label founded by Rio-based designer Monique Argalji. Trained at both Parsons School of Design and Central Saint Martins, Argalji approached construction as sculptural experimentation. At RioFW, foam was the collection’s primary material, manipulated into exaggerated hips, distorted sleeves, and dramatic silhouettes that hovered somewhere between armour, organism, and installation.
There was something deeply compelling about the flow between precision and instability in the collection. While many designers at RioFW leaned into fluidity and movement, Argalji pushed toward restriction and structure, creating bodies that appeared almost architecturally altered. The palette, ranging from black and beige to red and yellow hues, heightened the theatricality without overwhelming the garments’ formal experimentation. In a week heavily shaped by ideas of celebration and sensuality, Argalji offered something colder, stranger, and more cerebral. The collection remained rooted in Brazilian craft traditions through its emphasis on manual experimentation and tactile construction.
Meanwhile, Helô Rocha brought a softer emotional register to the schedule. Long celebrated for her romantic approach to femininity, Helô Rocha leaned into delicacy without allowing the work to become fragile. Embroidery, transparency, flowing silhouettes, and artisanal detailing grounded the collection in ideas of intimacy and memory, offering a counterpoint to the week’s louder, more performative moments. Rocha’s work seemed interested in emotional permanence through clothing that is designed to hold sentiment as much as form.
Another highlight of the week was the presentation by Adidas. With the inclusion of the global sportswear giant within the schedule, it reinforced how contemporary Brazilian fashion increasingly operates across luxury, streetwear, performance, and lifestyle simultaneously.
Most of the strongest moments throughout the week came from designers articulating distinctly Brazilian perspectives. What made Rio Fashion Week compelling ultimately wasn’t simply the return itself, but the entire atmosphere surrounding it. There was a palpable sense that Brazilian fashion is entering a new era of visibility, one more invested in defining its own intellectual and cultural frameworks. Across the week, designers treated Rio de Janeiro as a city where fashion remains inseparable from music, movement, nightlife, race, and public life.
If this relaunch was intended to re-establish Rio on the international fashion calendar, it succeeded not by imitating the structures of Paris, Milan, or New York, but through leaning further into what makes the city culturally singular in the first place. And with that, we’re excited for this new era of Rio Fashion Week and everything RioFW still has to unfold.
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Somewhere between a JCB in Mumbai, a Lagos street, and a wall in Addis Ababa, fashion lost its monopoly on what is interesting. The people making it happen were not waiting to be discovered.
Rachel Ojuromi did not start with a platform. She started with a YouTube channel - no editing, no production budget, no brief. Raw talking videos made in Lagos by someone who had not yet been told her perspective needed packaging. That was the foundation. Not a strategy. A refusal to wait. She went on to found The Process Africa, a platform documenting African creatives before the rest of the world decided to pay attention. The work she makes now - shot on Lagos streets, styled by Debby Fasingha, filmed by photographer Odey Ikpa - carries the same quality the YouTube videos had. Everything she makes is a love letter to the place she is from and the people creating it.
When Outlander Magazine posted her work under the headline "India's coolest girl has influenced Rachel Ojuromi to become Nigeria's coolest girl," Outlander themselves wrote in the caption: "I could watch a million of these videos." Rachel's response from her own account was simply: "You guys are the coolest!! Thank youuuu." One comment. Then back to making. The "influenced" framing is the internet's version of the story. The fuller version is that Rachel was already doing this before it had a name, and Lagos was always the point.
In February 2026, Diya Joukani walked out onto the streets of Bandra in embroidered denim, and the internet stopped. No artificial lighting. Often just a white sheet and an iPhone. That rawness is the strategy. Her label, DiyaDiya Studio, fuses global streetwear silhouettes with aari and zardozi embroidery handwork repurposed from bridal couture onto denim, worn on a JCB on a Tuesday.
Since January, the format has been recreated thousands of times across the globe. London. Beirut. Moscow. Bengaluru. The replication is flattering. Then Rihanna came to Mumbai for her Fenty Beauty Ki Haveli pop-up and sought Diya out specifically. "You have been all over the internet! Congratulations on everything," the Grammy winner told her, before the two filmed a street walk video together. When the most famous woman in fashion travels to your city and asks to be part of your format, the argument is settled.
Kalu Putik, known online as kaluputics, takes it to its furthest point. He is not using his city as a backdrop. He is building the clothes from it. Locally sourced, disposable materials turned into statement looks. No expensive tools. Just an eye for creativity and whatever he can find around him. A single video has crossed 200 million views and 10 million likes. An Instagram comment sits unanswered, not because he is ignoring the audience, but because he is too busy making the next thing to stop and respond to the last one. Fashion houses are reportedly taking notes. The constraint is not a limitation repackaged as virtue. It is the work itself.
The industry's assumption was always that quality required conditions. The right city. The right light. The right room. What Rachel, Diya, and Kalu disprove - separately, without coordinating, across three continents, is that assumption. Quality comes from knowing exactly what you are trying to say. The infrastructure is optional. Paris, Milan, New York, and London still exist. The system they built still functions. But it no longer has a monopoly on what is interesting and that loss of monopoly is the most significant thing to happen to fashion content in years. Not because three creators went viral. Because they went viral making work that the system would never have funded, in cities the system would never have chosen, with resources the system would never have approved.
The industry is paying attention now. Whether it understands what it is looking at is a different question entirely.
After only catching glimpses of her in photos on her Tumblr late 2025, a connection was finally made with the South London-based artist earlier this year when, this time, the then-twenty-one-year old was miming and vibing in another music video for a song they had just released exclusively on the blogging platform. The music escapes memory, but the muted colours, handheld cam and retro grain of the picture remain. And when you finally settle into Sade Olutola’s music, the last piece of the puzzle, it all makes sense.
Olutola’s Tumblr community is a slice of the blog’s quiet revival being fuelled by young people and their 2010s nostalgia. But this isn’t just a Tumblr affair for the British-Nigerian. From shooting music videos on multiple iPhone 4s, to the digicam aesthetic of her photos, and the bloomers, the net pop socks and gloves, vintage boots, leopard prints, and the chunky spiral pendants, brick by brick, Sade Olutola is reaching for, and building a world inspired by her, and her nostalgia. In May 2026, Deeds Magazine sat down with Olutola in an exclusive conversation to discuss her music, world-building, and the different shades of her person.
Fortune, for Deeds Magazine:
Hi Sade! How’re you doing?
Sade Olutola:
Hi Fortune! I’m good. How’re you?
I’m good, too. Great to finally have you. How was your session?
I’m still in it. It’s been amazing.
Oh, great. And how often do you do these sessions?
Honestly, I've been working a lot recently, so it's just once a week. But I'm trying to quit my job to do music full-time, so hopefully it'd be like three, four times a week, and from there I would like to be in the studio every day.
That's cool. I thought it was chill how quickly you responded to my Tumblr Ask the other day.
Oh, no, I feel like Tumblr is the best way to reach me, honestly.
I thought so.
Yeah. Because no one's on there, and I like that.
Exactly: no one's on there.
All these other apps, Oh My God. And I liked your little note. It was so cute. I love that you're Nigerian as well. Stand up!
Haha, yeah. And it was on Tumblr that I first found you, too. That was like last year.
Oh, really? Wait, you found me on Tumblr?
Yeah. And it was surprising how the algorithm brought you my way. A friend had made me join just a while before. Then one day, while scrolling, I saw a Nigerian name: Sade Olutola. And the rest is history.
Really?
Yeah. And so it’s crazy that we're having this interview right now.
That’s my favorite story. Like, it's so authentic. Because nobody's on there, do you understand? You have to be a very special kind of amazing person to find me there.
Taking that as a compliment. I think what about you I find the most fascinating is the painstakingness of your world-building: Your Tumblr, the dressing, the music—the way they all come together. And you come across to me as an artist with … ‘musical patience.’ Am I right?
Yes, thank you. I'm very specific. Even to my own detriment. The amount of stress I put my producer through to get my EP out is insane.
Luca?
Yeah, Luca, yeah. You know my whole life story, wow.
Haha. Been doing my homework.
Yes, yes, you have. I love that.
Do you then think your music is the soundtrack for this world, or it's a separate thing?
No, I think I am the source. When I decide to make a visual, that is coming from me. And when I decide to make music, that's coming from me. So I think what ties my brand together is me. I want everything to be true to myself. Whenever I go about stuff, I have these three pillars: nostalgia, community, and authenticity. So I think that's what makes all I do feel cohesive. I am always trying, trying to be as true to myself as I possibly can.
I feel that. What did you listen to before 11?
That's actually a good question. Before 11, um, I wasn't listening to Ed Sheeran—Oh, I think I was just listening to whatever was on the radio, from movies and stuff. And I remember I liked that song, “Uptown Funk” by Bruno Mars. I loved the black pop girls, too. Rihanna, Nicki, Beyonce. I knew that I loved them. But when I got my iPods at 11, I locked in. And that was the foundation.
Like you were in control.
Yeah, do you see what I mean?
Interesting because I've seen stories of the Ed Sheeran phase, and been curious about what was before that.
That's a very good question, actually, because I haven't talked about that.
Growing up on Tumblr, were there any artists that you fangirled on there?
So, I'm not gonna lie, I went through a K-pop phase. So if you scroll down my Tumblr, you'll see that it's lots of BTS, haha.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, so I was really, really into BTS back then. But besides that, I was actually on Tumblr for artsy reasons. I would look at photographs and all. It was more of the artsy side than music.
You know, this makes sense because I was reading something like two weeks ago on this curator, and she mentioned that it was on Tumblr that she first found her connection with the contemporary African visual artists that shaped her introduction to the field. Artists like Lana Del Rey and Tyler, the Creator, too, who built on Tumblr, also suggest a trend of visual-oriented artists using the blog in those days. And I think you are, too.
Yeah, I am. On my iPod, there was Beyoncé's self-titled visual album. She made a music video for every song, so I was inspired by that. Honestly, I'm not going to lie, when Beyonce said that, Oh, she's the first person to do that, I was thinking, I would have done that anyway, haha. I always thought, when you've written a hard song, and you put it out, why is there not a video to it? I always want to see a video. So, “Arrow Heart”, my EP, is a visual album. I'm working on a music video for each single, every one. ‘Game for Two’ is coming out soon, so look out for that.
Oh, I'm looking forward to that.
Thank you.
Talking about Beyonce, what do you like about the song with J. Cole, ‘Party’?
That's my favourite song! But did you know that, though?
Haha yeah, I did.
Haha, how did you find that out? That's so random. I never put that out anywhere. Anyway, I love that song. It’s so amazing because I like how she calls Ay, Ay in the chorus, making actual party sounds. I think that's genius. And then J. Cole's verse, oh, it's just so silly and fun and embodies what it feels like to party. It also sounds old-school, and I just love anything that sounds a little bit retro. The vocals are amazing too—it's Beyonce, what do you mean?
Haha right. In that case, which rapper would you say has had the most influence on you? Because it looks like ‘Party’ for you is more of Beyonce than the J.Cole feature.
Yeah, but he carried, though—I'm not gonna lie. Rappers that influence me, I'm not gonna lie, the reason I rap is because of Ed Sheeran. I would listen to “Multiply” on repeat every night. I learned all the lyrics back to back, and I didn't even know what Genius was. Number two, I love A Tribe Called Quest, love Q-Tip, love Kanye West as well. But my style, the way that I sing, that I rap, is literally from Ed Sheeran.
Baba mi sọ fún mi / Sade, take it easy / Listen to your daddy. What song is that?
Yo, that song is so bad. Haha.
Is it?
Haha, that song is so … That's like the worst thing I've ever written.
Haha, no, I don’t think it was that bad.
No, I was spitting, though. (Hums the chorus)
The flow.
It was a vibe.
Still remember the title?
Yeah, it's, wait—it's ‘Sọ fun mi’
That's it, yeah. Was that when you were in Nigeria?
No, actually. That was when I came back, when I was 18.
So, is there any chance this Nigerianness would ever get into your music again?
Yes, definitely. Do you know Cruel Santino?
What? He’s like my top-three.
I have to make something with him. He's like my favourite artist. I really want to go into the alté scene. I want people to know that I'm Nigerian.
I feel like if you were Nigerian-based, you’d be on the alté scene.
Exactly. I feel like the alté scene is just waiting for me.
What was the feeling like at the release party?
Oh, I was overwhelmed. I couldn't believe that I had a fan base out in America, so I was really shocked that so many people came to support me. And their vibe was all bubbly and fun. London has this very ‘tush’ vibe, stiff, but no, no, my listeners aren't like that, but it was crazy that I was meeting strangers, and they were all acting like I'm their sister. I really appreciated that.
I can imagine that. So you’ve also said that you buy bouquets weekly. Tell me about that.
Oh, I do that because I realized that as we grow older, we start to take less care of ourselves and prioritize work and doing hard things to push our career and stuff. And I feel like when you're overworking yourself, it’s a form of abuse in some way, or just not giving yourself any time. So for me, my gift to myself every week is to make sure that there are fresh flowers on my table. It’s a very small thing, but when I look at my new flowers, they make me happy, and, honestly, everybody needs to just work a bit harder to take care of themselves. That’s like my little idea of fun, and it keeps me sane.
Deep.
Laughs.
Yeah, really. So. Why nostalgia?
Nostalgia because, I'm not gonna lie, I feel like it's because I didn't really have an exciting childhood. I think that's why I'm always trying to ... Like me trying to create the childhood that I wanted. And also, I love things that feel old; they feel like home. In this day and age, things are moving too fast, like AI—things are getting faster and, I don't know, there's just beauty in how old things used to be, and how processes took longer, how things were simpler. I think I'm just trying to cling to that by making my visuals feel like those times. Nostalgia feels like safety, do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I feel you. Because, even in theory, nostalgia is romantic: how it has to do with selective remembering, filtering comfort times, and helping you revisit these moments, without actually returning.
Yeah, literally. Definitely. Makes a lot of sense.
What does visibility feel like now to you, Sade?
Honestly, I feel blessed. I feel like God has helped me do my thing, and I'm just very grateful to him. And, I'm just trying to take it easy, slowly, step-by-step, because I get imposter syndrome sometimes.
I mean, that's unavoidable.
Yeah, or, like, it happens that I comment something, and someone gets excited and I’m like, I'm literally nobody, can you calm down? Haha. I’ve had people stop me in public and go ‘Oh, I listen to your music.’ And I’m like, you do? I haven't really adjusted to people actually knowing me. It’s insane. In my mind, obviously, I'm the same person, because I'm me. But I still can't just believe it.
Do you also ever think that this visibility, because of how generic it can get, could threaten your aesthetic?
One thing about me is I’m going to be true to myself throughout. I like things that are authentic, and I think that is something that the music industry is missing: everything is so clean and polished. So I would like to stay as raw and DIY as I possibly can, and I think that is what makes my brand special. I don't think there's any need to change, even if there's money, big labels and stuff, like, I would always be true to myself.
And I feel like one can always tell when someone is truly being authentic, and I can say I see that in you.
Thank you.
Also, I like those leopard-print soles.
Thank you. Thank you, I love that.
I think another fascinating thing about you, to me, apart from the world building, is how your style has evolved over the years. I came upon a couple of old videos of you in white and black and I thought, Oh, it's been a long time coming. But it was also beautiful to see that growth arc.
Yeah! I'm scared, do you know where I live?
Ha! Maybe. I might.
Haha, yeah, I went through a little emo phase. I feel like I’m still evolving. Fashion, for me, is not over.
That's great. Talking about fashion, obviously you are best known for music, but I know there're other things you do: painting, designing. But music is the most popular. How then do you tend to these other interests, without neglecting them, and while trying to not get boxed?
Do you know something? It's a battle right now. Because music is taking a lot of my time, and I also work. But I really want to be known as an artist, not just music, because I am really quite good at painting. And I also really enjoy designing. So what I do for now is paint on weekends, do sketches and everything, but there will be a time where I'll take that very seriously also and promote it just as hard as my music, because I feel like there isn't anybody doing that. The closest person I can think of is one of my biggest inspirations, Mowalola.
Oh I know her.
Basically I'm gonna be Mowalola and Slawn if they were one. That's it, that's it, that's it!
Haha I get that. If you were to make a Nigerian playlist of five artists, who would be on it?
Listen: Luwa.Mp4! (Sings CYK BADDIE)
I like that song.
So much. Then his sister, Indi.
Oh, Indi’s good.
She is. I love her so much. Then, I guess Mowalola—she's got some bangers. And Rema! That’s actually my favorite artist of all time in the Afrobeats scene. I’ll literally die for that—
Hmm, are you sure this is just about the music?
Hahaha he’s also a very fine boy. But um, we’re not gonna talk about that. Anyway, I have one more artist. Trying to think …
Tems?
Tems! Sorry, she's my favorite! I love her so much. A vocal killer.
Was it ‘Replay’, the song of hers you were trying to play the guitar to?
I can't believe you found that by the way. I'm terrified.
You should be haha. We haven't talked about “Arrow Heart”, imagine.
It's okay. People always ask me about that, so it's like I have to repeat the same thing.
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True. On the EP, ‘Ready 4 It’ is my favourite. What do you think about that?
Wow, I love that. I appreciate that. Because ‘Ready 4 It’, I feel like it's a hard song to sonically digest. So if you like ‘Ready 4 It’, you just have taste.
Right, thank you. I like ‘Grey Matter’ a lot too because of how visual it is to me. I feel like the EP is a non-linear story. Well, that's if it's about one person. As a heartbreak album, I was wondering if the stories were all about the same guy, or—
Yes!
The same guy?
The same guy!
That's crazy.
That's crazy!
That must have been one big rollercoaster.
Like... If I tell you!
Because, there was a point where it was all good. That's probably on ‘Grey Matter’. Like a low-key relationship, and then there was ‘2099’ where you clocked that he was cheating, and on ‘Don’t Bother’ he's trying to explain why he cheated and you’re saying ‘Nah, don’t bother, man.’
Yeah, literally.
And then there was ‘Ready 4 It’ where it’s like he’s trying to apologize but you’re giving him your conditions. On ‘Game for Two’ you have come to terms with the reality of the relationship. It is tense, & there’s the tone of resignation that makes it just a perfect way to close the EP.
Wow, you really studied my work. I’m honored. Thank you for that.
It’s my pleasure. Enjoyed it. So, I got a song rec for you, Sade.
Oh, thank you. What is it?
‘Omoge Wa Jo’.
Wait, but I love that song!
You know the OG version, too?
Oh, the one that he sampled?
Yeah, the one he sampled.
Oh, okay.
I love that one as well. But listen to the OG version.
I will.
Now, your turn.
Oh. Um, Indi's new song!
Oh, I saw that. But I haven't listened yet, so I’m going to.
I can’t remember what it's called. I think it's only on YouTube. She ate that up.
I'll check. It was a pleasure having you around, Sade.
Oh, likewise. You’re great. I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.
I hope you have an amazing end to your session, too.
Fifty days before Paris’ famous Fete De La Musique festival, Sixtion, a French collective of DJs and creatives, returned to London for their final event pre-Fete. Held annually in the Summer Solstice, music lovers, vibe catchers, cherie’s and mec’s sing and dance their way through the Parisian arrondissements for a day that truly honours and embodies music and culture, from dusk until dawn. In preparation and celebration, Sixtion have hosted the kind of parties only legend spoke of. Music playing, drinks pouring, and hips swaying - all night long. And while their doors opened late on the 1st of May 2026, their Francophone Sound event at the Village Underground gave attendees the French prep class, and the FOMO-inducer they needed ahead of what’s shaping up to be an unforgettable summer.
Known for their faire la fête différemment (party differently) mindset, Sixtion has been “setting the tone for all enthusiasts of African music and cultures” since 2019. When four artists came together in Paris with the desire to bring people together through musical discovery, celebration, and a collective energy, it became their identity and created the cultural experiences known today.
Previous events with artists like Shallipoppi, Guy2Bezbar, and Moliy have brought the diaspora together across continents, including Abidjan, Montreal, and Brooklyn. Partnerships with other collectives like Recess, Everyday People, and Sunday Abidjan have spread the wave of African artists and sounds globally, positioning the Sixtion as “a voice for rich and vibrant culture.”
With an £18 ticket off of DICE FM, a fly outfit, and the plan to party until the sun came up, it was time to head to Shoreditch. Advertised from 11 PM to 5 AM, the sharp change from addictive French rap to lilting Zouk styles pulsated through the walls of the venue as guests approached.
The lights dim and the bass blasts as the night officially begins with Lisa Keeks gracing the decks. Coaxing the crowd inside with a blend of modern must-knows and catchy classics, the lights illuminated smiling faces, filled cups, and shifting feet.
Branded stickers made their way around the venue, sticking on sweat-slicked skin and specialty drinks. Phones came out as everyone, from bar staff to photographers, sang along, moving in time to the multicoloured strobe lights and familiar melodies.
As the clock struck 3 a.m, Deejay Why reached the decks with old classics like Awilo Longomba’s Karolina. Subsequently, Mastaque’s ode to football prompted fans of any nation to chant Ramenez coupe à la maison and Coup de marteau. The night closed with DJ Nairaa’s smooth Afrobeat and R&B mixes to turn down the tempo as the night came to a close.
Sixtion’s final gift was the release of two new events for the coveted weekend: an opening soiree at the Secret Place on June 20th and a collaborative club night with Machine Paris and Sunday Abidjan on June 21st.
The next sets came in quick succession by co-founders Jojo SK and Daddy Chulo (DC), introduced by host Willz Wida Vibez. Joe Dwet File’s Rihanna continued the kompa dancing and activated waistlines from Congo to Clapham. Then a well-timed switch to Denden’s Padtal left the room breathless as claps filled the air and the crowd yelled: “On n’est pa fatigues (we aren’t tired).”
The doors closed at 5 AM, with hints of the sunrise greeting guests on their way home, and as Sixtion said goodbye to London before their biggest event of the year.
Cover & Photos by SIXTION x @nimble.photos
IG: clunghao
Most artists want to be seen immediately. But up-and-coming Nigerian Afrobeats/Pop singer-songwriter Brume doesn’t really operate like that. Instead, his music feels less like an announcement and more like something you ease into over time–building slowly, almost quietly, until you realise you’ve been listening for longer than you intended.
Born William Okukulabe Oghenetejiri (aka Yano Boy), Brume has been shaping a fresh, upbeat and melodic sound within the new wave of contemporary African music, seen in his debut EP Rockstar, blending Afrobeats, highlife influences, and vibrant percussion into a bold, youthful emotionally aware body of work, with tracks like “Your Woman,” “Bum Bum”, and “Last Card” revealing an artist equally comfortable in confidence as he is in vulnerability–a trait that’s positioned him as one of Nigeria’s rising talents, gaining steady regional recognition.
But what makes Brume compelling isn’t simply the music; it’s the mindset shaping it. “Presently, I’m leaning into who I am,” he tells Deeds. “If you pay attention, it sounds like it’s more than one person singing when you hear my songs, so I’m letting my multiple personalities have fun on every record. That way I embrace how my brain thinks…there’s always something new for every record.”
That restlessness is written all over his artistry. While Afrobeats continues to dominate globally, Brume belongs to a younger crop of artists stretching its boundaries rather than simply reproducing its most commercial forms. Across his catalogue, he pulls from alté textures, softer melodies, and emotionally driven songwriting without ever fully committing to one lane. The result is a sound that resists easy placement, not because it’s trying to be genreless, but because emotion sits at the centre of everything.
And for Brume, that emotional honesty comes from lived experience. “To me, music is art,” he says. “I grew up in a military background, going to military school. My emotions were suppressed…the only way I get to speak and talk is through my music. I just want my listeners to feel everything I’ve taught myself to feel.”
That vulnerability, paired with his melodic control, is what separates Brume from many of his peers in a scene that often prioritises immediacy. His latest release “Many Girls” in March alongside Thizislondon, the renowned record producer and DJ whose work with Rema, Ayra Starr, 6LACK [has helped shape the current sound of mainstream Afrobeats]; marked perhaps his biggest co-sign yet–and a glimpse into what comes next, without forcing Brume to abandon what makes his music distinct describing the (dubbed) hot-girl anthem as, “...showcasing a personality nobody has seen from me. I keep evolving. I hate doing the same thing...”
That may be Brume’s biggest strength right now. His artistry doesn’t feel engineered for virality or built around predictable formulas. Instead, it relies on something harder to manufacture: mood, restraint, and a willingness to keep evolving. Not every artist benefits from that kind of slow discovery. Brume does!
While the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art played host to the rigid choreography of the red carpet, a more visceral energy was vibrating through a private enclave across the city. In a definitive "Met Gala moment" that signaled a new era of industry gathering, Deeds Mag, The Meadia Agency, and Gifted Humans converged to host an inaugural watch party that felt less like a viewing and more like a cultural summit.
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The Met Gala has long been the North Star for the avant-garde, a night where the industry’s heavyweights showcase the apex of sartorial storytelling. Yet, in the shadow of such high-octane exclusivity, there is often a void a need for a sanctuary where the architects of the culture can congregate without the velvet ropes of pretension. Deeds and its partners recognized this, offering a curated solution that transformed the evening into an immersive experience of collective genius.
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The execution relied on a specific synergy of expertise, rooted in the Deeds mission to create cultural impact through the intersections of fashion and music. The Meadia Agency, a marketing and production powerhouse founded by Joshua Mead, applied its signature focus on storytelling to bring this vision to life. By translating the magazine’s editorial depth into a tangible atmosphere, Mead ensured the event felt like a lived experience rather than a static broadcast. This was bolstered by the strategic touch of Gifted Humans, the consulting company founded by Gabrielle Harrison. Specialized in modern partnerships and cultural resonance, Harrison’s team developed the creative framework that connected talent and community in a way that felt both meaningful and permanent.
From the initial guest curation to the meticulous, full-scale activation buildout, every touchpoint of the evening was designed to foster a sense of community that is all too rare at high-profile events. The atmosphere was a rich blend of creative synergy where record label representatives, fashion influencers, celebrities, and celebrated artists shared space and sparked dialogue. This wasn't merely about observing the celebrities on screen; it was about honoring the creative energy of the people in the room who keep the industry’s heart beating.
The energy was, quite simply, unmatched. Guests drifted through a space defined by high-fidelity vibrations, documenting the night through raw, signed Polaroids that captured the evening’s authentic aesthetic. Such an ambitious production reached its height through the sophisticated support of Maison Perrier and Hennessy, whose presence added a layer of refined hospitality to the night’s electric pulse.
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Ultimately, this activation served as a physical extension of the Deeds mission. As a global stage for "Culture Unwrapped," Deeds Mag is dedicated to revealing the layers of art, music, and identity that unite us across borders. By moving beyond the digital page and into the room, the publication continues its drive to document and empower the voices of a new creative generation—the dreamers, the doers, and the disruptors who are shaping tomorrow’s culture, today.
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This watch party proved that when Deeds, The Meadia Agency, and Gifted Humans collaborate, they don't just host an event they cultivate an ecosystem. They provided a reminder that the most "fire" moments aren't always found under the flashbulbs of the Met, but in the spaces where community and creativity are given the room to truly breathe.
Photos by: kd.thadon ,danaerxy,badbrad.pic
VVS Lagos will return for its fifth edition in 2026 with Afromodernism as its defining theme, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of one of Africa’s most closely watched cultural platforms.
Over the past four editions, VVS Lagos has quietly built a reputation for convening a new generation of African creative leadership; bringing together fashion designers, visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural thinkers whose work increasingly shapes global conversations. With more than 8,000 attendees and over 100 brands and 120 artists presented to date since inception in 2022, the platform has grown into a critical node within the continent’s cultural ecosystem.
Afromodernism reflects a broader shift already underway: a reassertion of African authorship across fashion, art, and visual culture. Rooted in heritage yet defined by contemporary expression, it speaks to a generation working fluidly across disciplines where craftsmanship, image-making, and digital culture intersect with new economic ambition.
From July 5th - 12th 2026, VVS will unfold across a curated programme of exhibitions, runway presentations, screenings, and private convenings staged throughout Lagos. A significant portion of the week will be anchored through a dedicated partnership with Nahous, positioning it as a central site for key moments across the schedule.
The platform continues to expand its developmental focus. Following the introduction of Future Labs in 2025; which presented 25 emerging visual artists and 20 emerging fashion designers, this year’s edition will introduce an open call, offering selected creatives access to mentorship, potential grant support, and the opportunity to present within the VVS Lagos framework.
Institutional engagement also deepens. VVS Lagos will extend its collaboration with the British Council, with an expanded programme spanning both art and fashion, while continuing its partnership with Ledrop Nigeria, activating cultural experiences in collaboration with Glenfiddich and Casa Maestri.
A new partnership with the Africa Creators Summit signals a further shift towards the convergence of cultural production and digital distribution. The collaboration will see designers, artists, and filmmakers working directly with leading content creators to produce original, platform-native work, naturally extending the reach of African creative output beyond the physical event and into global digital ecosystems.
To mark its fifth anniversary, VVS Lagos will also inaugurate a series of honorary awards celebrating exceptional brands and individuals across the arts, creative business, and creative technology; recognising those shaping the future of African innovation and cultural expression.
Alongside its physical programme, VVS Lagos will also unveil a collaborative music project in early June and a mobile app aimed at fostering year-round engagement within its growing creative and business network.
As it enters its fifth year, VVS Lagos continues to evolve with clarity and intent; less as an event, and more as a framework through which African creative expression is produced, experienced, and distributed.
More partnerships to be announced!
For press inquiries, partnerships, and participation, visit www.vvslagos.com or follow @vvslagos
on Instagram.
The quiet thrum of Afrobeats swelled as the sound of giddy laughter and excited gasps filled Indra Gallery as Lagos fashion infiltrated England’s capital. From May 1st to the 2nd of 2026, fashion stylist and curator Temi Akande landed in London with her brand Temi’s Closet to more than just the warm weather and sun greeting her. With over 600 RSVP’s and 21 brands on display, Akande’s message was simple: African fashion is here to stay - straight from the continent to the diaspora.
A wardrobe and personal styling service known for its vast selection of brands and styles, Temi’s Closet used its two-days in London turned British to platform various clothing, jewellery, and accessories stores straight from Nigeria. Brands like Melira, Tuntunre, Flaunt Archive, and Mairachamp filled the space with colourful designs for the diaspora to devour, some in the UK for the first time. Shoppers found themselves in Shoreditch, one of the most creative bits of London, alongside flowing refreshments, small bites, and a curated experience that brought a little bit of Lagos to them.
Akande’s goal? “Taking African brands everywhere.” Previously living in Atlanta and then Chicago for university, Akande relocated from the United States to Lagos with a specific interest in consuming Nigerian brands. After settling in, she knew she wanted to share the work being done by the abundance of designers and teams with the world. “These clothes and items are made for us - I don’t have to worry about fit or sizing as I would with a Zara or H&M,” she said. “Every brand here brings something to the space that is valuable.”
What looks like a clear forecast now, though, was once muddled by red tape fueling domestic businesses' scepticism - and rightfully so. The bond between confidence, culture, community, and couture is at the core of clothing brands and consumers, especially in Africa. But where the continent grew in connection, the diaspora lacked. This symbiosis, shifted by international demand, needed a way to end the long disturbance of unreliable logistics, limited resources, and practical barriers. Enter Akande. This disconnect is what she has tasked herself with rewriting, through live events from New York to Lagos and, now, London.
“The [United] States is my home and comfort zone, but I’ve found beauty in going outside of that zone,” she said. “London was just the right step - I have a community to support me, and it’s a fashion city. We’ve got our biggest turnout yet, and it’s all because people want this.”
As the influence of Africa’s fashion goes beyond its city streets and into ateliers and runways, the question of global scaling and reach has always been at hand - both professionally and personally. Diasporic communities, though left out of the continent’s industrial growth, took up bringing clothes to and from the continent themselves, until recently, when they’ve contributed over $15 billion annually. All the while, market potential has grown through various outlets, opening a gap for domestic brands to reach shoppers abroad.
In an article by VOGUE Business in 2020, author Adedoyin Adeniji noticed this opportunity to reach the diaspora already being seized by companies, like Industrie Africa and Akrikrea (now known as Anka Marketplace). At the time, the markets had a growing demand for African designer goods globally, with e-commerce opportunities estimated to be $19.8 billion and the local manufacturing industry expected to grow to $930 billion by 2025.
Adeniji found that “African designers [were] hoping that these partnerships, in addition to offering benefits like better shipping rates and distribution, would introduce a greater pool of customers to African fashion.” Currently, e-commerce opportunities sit at $176 billion, and local manufacturing has continued growing steadily, allowing businesses like Akande’s and budding e-commerce platforms, like Sauvryn Co, to accelerate partnerships.
Olive Anumba, founder of Sauvryn Co, founded the brand to create “Africa’s Revolve.” Revolve, a Western wholesale platform home to an array of luxury and designer brands, has climbed to recent fame and made its mark on the zeitgeist, appearing notably at Coachella as Revolvefest and expanding its accessibility worldwide. Anumba aims to replicate and build just that.
“It started with a trip to Lagos for Fashion Week towards the end of last year,” she said.
I’ve always loved discovering new brands, and while I was there, I went deep, researching and shopping with as many Nigerian brands as I could find. What I kept running into was friction; some brands were DM to order only, others had websites that weren’t fully functional. Even when the pieces were beautiful, I was having to ask questions before I could even place an order, and this was while I was already there in Lagos.”
She continued, saying, “...if it’s this hard for me here, what happens when I return to London and want to keep shopping for these brands? And what does that experience look like for any diaspora customer who discovers them?”
The rise in cellphone usage, known as smartphone adoption, has been revolutionary in the continued growth of both Akande and Anumba’s brands. The projected growth of e-commerce platforms by 80 per cent in 2030 has been a kickstart in allowing them to not only platform the designs, but also the teams of people behind them.
“While there are more opportunities to connect with African brands in person, we need to be giving more resources to the brands,” Akande said. “Unreliability in shipping and handling has impacted brands here this weekend…even with plenty of time and care given to making things run on time. Brands are more than just the garments - they are real people with real problems fighting this every day, who have value.”
Anumba echoed the sentiment, saying, “The shipping costs from Nigeria to the UK are quite high, then customs on top of that, then sometimes weeks of waiting on a made-to-order piece. The journey from discovery to purchase seemed broken. It wasn’t a talent problem. The talent was there. It was just hard to access.”
Despite the wariness of 5 years prior, both women have found the response to their work to speak for itself. Akande’s curation of the event was in her signature polished and personal style: honouring the brands that started with or grew alongside her and continue to show up hungry for more. She continues to keep her eye out for more brands across the continent to feature and refreshes her continued drive with events like the pop-up and a “love of the game.”
Anumba’s work continues to give pan-African fashion a platform as accessible to a shopper as Western sites. She said, “Progress has been made. Content creators, myself included, before Sauvryn even existed, have been doing organic discovery work, finding brands, buying pieces, posting about them and putting them in front of diaspora audiences who may not have found them otherwise. Temi’s Closet and OmaHub have created curated shopping experiences that allow diaspora customers to discover and shop African brands face-to-face. That’s meaningful. But there’s still work to do. Menswear isn’t getting nearly enough attention; the conversation is almost entirely focused on womenswear. And so many incredible brands across East Africa, Southern Africa and North Africa aren’t getting the same visibility as West African brands. That’s something Sauvryn is actively working toward as we grow. The vision was never just West Africa. It’s the whole continent.”
ig: clunghao
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Sophia Wanjiku quit her job as a domestic worker in Thika, Kenya at the end of 2020 and made a decision that had no obvious commercial logic: she would record vocals in Kikuyu, a language the industry had long treated as too regional, local, and small, and sell them as sample packs to producers she had never met. This week, the Kenyan singer, performing under her stage name Sofiya Nzau, crossed 750 million total streams on Spotify. No East African artist has done that before
Her path to that number came from an unlikely source. Brazilian DJ Zerb was on Splice, a paid sample licensing platform, searching for a vocal that could anchor a beat he had built. He spent about an hour browsing before he found a Kikuyu vocal clip that matched his instrumental's key exactly. He did not know what the lyrics meant. He reached out to Nzau on Instagram, she told him the song was about a woman fighting for a love her parents refused to accept, and he finished the track. “Mwaki”, which means "fire" in Kikuyu, was released on 10 November 2023. Within weeks, it was viral on TikTok, and within months, it had hit No. 1 on Spotify's Global Viral Chart and spawned remixes from Tiësto, Major Lazer, and Franky Wah. The original track is sung entirely in Kikuyu. Not a word of English.
Following Mwaki's global breakthrough, Nzau became the first East African artist to surpass 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify, held the title of the most-listened-to Kenyan artist on the platform for a significant stretch of 2025, and released “Wacuka” with German producer AVAION, a collaboration that crossed 60 million streams, with Germany emerging as her single largest market.
She participated in Tomorrowland's exclusive Lab of Tomorrow songwriting camp before taking the main stage in Boom, Belgium, becoming the first Kenyan and East African artist to ever perform at the festival, before a crowd of over 400,000. Her European tour kicked off on 13 July 2025 with a sold-out show in Amsterdam, taking her through Berlin, Paris and London. Ahead of the performance, Nzau spoke about what the European tour meant to her, describing it as life-changing and saying the love she felt from fans there in person was something she had not expected at that scale.
PLS&TY's track Your Love (Antdot Remix), which features Nzau, later landed on the official EA Sports FC 26 soundtrack alongside artists including Ed Sheeran.
East Africa has produced world-class female talent for years, talent that has largely been celebrated within the region while the global industry looked elsewhere. Tanzania's Zuchu, a Bongo Flava singer, became the first female East African artist to earn YouTube's Gold Play Button. Kenya's Nikita Kering, an Afropop singer, swept AFRIMA's Best Female Artist in East Africa award twice. These women did sustained, decorated work. None of them has cracked global streaming numbers at this scale, and that is not a reflection of their talent.
It is a reflection of how slowly the global industry moves on African women, until it cannot ignore the numbers any longer. Sofiya Nzau did not wait for a label co-sign or a feature from a bigger name. She uploaded vocal packs during a pandemic and let the music do what the industry said it could not. The path she has carved is real. The question now is who walks through it next.
IG: @zoannafr
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The carpet was not red this year. Hand-painted to resemble a stone garden pathway - tan, patches of moss green, framed by wisteria lining the ceiling and walls - it looked less like a red carpet and more like a painting you had walked into. The 2026 Met Gala, built around the Costume Institute's new "Costume Art" exhibition, came with a perfectly straightforward dress code. Fashion is Art. Four hundred guests. One question. Who actually committed?
The night's most anticipated moment arrived late and was delivered completely. After a 10-year absence, Beyoncé returned to the Met Gala steps in a skeleton-inspired custom Olivier Rousteing gown with a massive feathered train and intricate crystal headpiece, flanked by Jay-Z and their 14-year-old daughter Blue Ivy. Beyoncé described the experience as "surreal," adding that it felt "incredible to share it" with Blue. Jay-Z arrived in a suit - fine, but Blue Ivy, at 14, on the Met Gala carpet with her mother returning after a decade, was the more interesting story.
Emma Chamberlain opened the carpet as Vogue's livestream host in a colourful custom Mugler by Miguel Castro Freitas that channelled a painter's palette - joyful, deliberate, immediately on theme. She set the standard early, and most guests spent the rest of the night catching up. Janelle Monáe arrived in a custom Christian Siriano dress featuring electrical wires, animatronic butterflies, and live moss. The brief said Fashion is Art. Monáe brought a functioning ecosystem. Heidi Klum transformed herself into a marble statue, inspired by Raffaele Monti's Veiled Vestal, with a custom look by makeup artist Mike Marino that painted her face, hands, and feet in stone. When asked about it on the livestream, she said simply: "Fashion is art, art is fashion." Her only complaint was the heat. The commitment is unmatched. Chase Infiniti wore McQueen and looked precisely like what the exhibition was built around - a dressed body as an art object. Clean, elegant, completely considered.
Rachel Zegler channelled the 1883 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche and added a blindfold as the finishing accessory. Dramatic, specific, historically grounded. Karan Johar made his Met Gala debut in a custom Manish Malhotra ensemble inspired by the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, saying, "Raja Ravi Varma felt right because his work does something I've always tried to do in cinema. He painted feelings." On his first Met Gala appearance, Johar arrived with context, intention, and a designer who understood both. That is how you debut. Sabine Getty brought old-world glamour that felt entirely at home on a carpet designed to look like a Renaissance garden pathway - one of the quieter standout looks of the evening.
Kendall Jenner worked with Zac Posen on a custom GapStudio gown inspired by the Victory of Samothrace - a Hellenistic Greek sculpture currently in the Louvre. Conceptually considered. Keke Palmer arrived in a strawberry red off-the-shoulder gown wearing a $1 million Wempe necklace - red on red, worn with full conviction. Tyla brought mermaid energy. Doja Cat leaned into dark glamour. Teyana Taylor delivered. SZA was joyful. Anok Yai wore Balenciaga, accessorised with golden tears - a small detail that did more work than most full looks on the carpet. Rihanna arrived glittering. Doechii went barefoot with a dramatic headpiece and said on the livestream: "The Met is very clean. Not the streets of New York City, but the Met is very clean. And I'm here. I'm committed." Commitment noted. Kris Jenner arrived in Dolce and Gabbana alongside Kim Kardashian - Kim in a look by Allen Jones and Whitaker Malem that leaned softer than her usual Met Gala register. Wisdom Kaye was present.
Then there was Grandpa Benito. Bad Bunny wore Zara and serious prosthetics to appear several decades older. When asked how many hours the look took, he said: "53 years exactly." Whether this is absurdist genius or a very expensive Halloween costume is a debate the internet will settle.
What is undeniable is that he committed, and in a room full of people who played it safe, that counts for something. Jaafar Jackson, currently deep in the artist's mindset from playing his uncle Michael Jackson in the new Lionsgate biopic, made his Met Gala debut. It is his first time.
A suit at the Met Gala is not a statement. It is the absence of one. When the dress code is Fashion is Art and the carpet is full of marble statues, animatronic butterflies, living moss, and feathered trains - a well-tailored suit reads less as a choice and more as a refusal to make one. Most of the men on the carpet this year opted for exactly that. Jaafar Jackson gets a pass. It was his first time. The others had no such excuse.
"Fashion is Art" turns out to be the easiest dress code to ignore and the hardest one to actually pull off. The gap between those two things was visible all night.
A Lagos return, a personal manifesto, and a collection that dresses women on their own terms
With the launch of ‘Never Getting Married,’ Fisayo Longe isn’t just introducing a new collection–she’s staging a return. Presented in Lagos at Alára Lagos, the latest drop from Kai Collective arrived as both a fashion statement and a cultural reset, reframing what it means for a globally recognized African brand to come back to where its story began. Beyond the clothes, the moment reflects how African fashion brands are balancing global growth with cultural roots, proving that where a brand returns to can matter just as much as where it expands.
At first glance, ‘Never Getting Married’ reads as a provocation–playful, contradictory, and deliberately loaded. But its origins are deeply personal. The collection draws from Longe’s own wedding to creative director and photographer Afolabi Mosuro, a multi-day Lagos celebration that unfolded under the ironic hashtag #NeverGettingMarried. Rather than adhere to traditional bridal codes, the couple approached the occasion as a fully realized fashion narrative, where each look functioned less as a ceremony and more as a statement.
Neon lime silks replaced expected pastels; sculptural metallic corsetry stood in for delicate lace; rich brocades and bold prints disrupted the language of ivory and champagne. In one standout moment, Longe wore a structured gold breastplate paired with a maroon leopard-print skirt and traditional coral adornments, while Mosuro mirrored the energy in a velvet agbada. Elsewhere, a crimson and black brocade gown anchored by an exaggerated architectural bow rejected softness in favor of presence. Together, their wardrobe became less about marriage and more about authorship–a shared, deliberate exercise in dressing with conviction.
What emerged from that moment now lives on in the collection. ‘Never Getting Married’ is not about rejecting romance, but about rejecting the expectation that identity must soften within it. Instead, leaning into a kind of controlled excess where volume, texture and color collide without apology. Bubble skirts in heavy brocaded damask sit alongside sculptural peplum tops and fringe-layered suede pieces that move with intention. The palette is deliberately electric, pairing citrus tones with deeper indigos, while unexpected elements–like Kai-branded football jerseys–inject a sense of irony into the mix. Even its more relaxed offerings, from parachute trousers to denim jorts, hold their shape with a quiet defiance. It’s a wardrobe built on tension: ceremonial but wearable, structured yet kinetic, rooted in tradition but unmistakably contemporary.
On its own terms, the brand describes the collection as “statement pieces for those who move on their own terms,” and more pointedly, for those “who don’t explain themselves to anybody, do what they want, and wear what they want.” It’s less a tagline than a thesis–one that connects the wedding, the collection, and the woman Kai Collective has always dressed.
Kai Collective’s rise has been anything but accidental. Founded in 2016 by Longe, the brand began as what she once described as “a love letter to women,” rooted in the desire to create pieces that felt both expressive and affirming. Early traction came through social media, where its distinctive prints and body-conscious silhouettes resonated with a global audience looking for something that felt both familiar and new. Over time, it evolved into one of the most recognizable contemporary brands to emerge from the African diaspora–balancing digital virality with a clear, consistent design identity.
But if the collection is personal, its presentation at Alára Lagos transforms it from a standard launch into something more layered. Since its founding, Alára has positioned itself as a cultural and commercial force within African fashion–part concept store, part gallery, part statement of intent. It is a space that has consistently championed African designers while placing them in dialogue with global luxury, creating a context where local creativity is not peripheral, but central. For the brand which has spent years building a global presence, mastering the mechanics of digital-age fashion, community-building, visual consistency and cultural resonance, context is important. But growth at that scale inevitably raises questions about proximity and how far a brand can expand before it begins to drift from its origins.
Returning to Lagos, then, is not just symbolic–it is structural. It reconnects the brand to the cultural ecosystem that informed its sensibility while situating it within a city that continues to shape global fashion conversations. Lagos has long been a site of style production rather than passive consumption, where fashion lives in the everyday as much as it does on runways. Its influence is instinctive, constantly evolving, and increasingly visible on a global stage.
That idea of “coming home” carries particular weight for a designer like Longe, whose identity is shaped by diaspora experience. As a Nigerian-British creative, her work has always existed between worlds, drawing from traditional Nigerian dressing while engaging contemporary global aesthetics. That influence is not always literal, but it is embedded in the confidence of the silhouettes, the boldness of the color, and the understanding of clothing as both adornment and assertion.
In this way, Kai Collective’s homecoming becomes part of a broader shift within African fashion. For years, the narrative has centered on expansion–on entering Western markets and gaining international validation. While that remains important, there is a growing emphasis on strengthening local industries and redefining luxury from within the continent. Spaces like Alára Lagos are central to that shift, acting as both commercial platforms and cultural anchors.
Kai Collective sits comfortably within this evolution. It is a brand that understands how to operate globally while remaining culturally grounded, speaking to both African and diaspora audiences without dilution. Its appeal lies in its ability to create clothing that feels specific yet accessible. ‘Never Getting Married’ builds on this foundation, using personal narrative as a way to deepen its connection to its community.
At the center of it all, Longe remains herself, as both founder and creative director, maintaining a clarity of vision that anchors the brand through its growth. Ultimately, the collection is less about contradiction and more about control–about defining one’s narrative on one’s own terms.
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In 1965, Yves Saint Laurent sent a series of shift dresses down the runway that looked almost too simple to matter. Flat planes of color, thick black lines, rigid geometry. The reference was explicit: Piet Mondrian. What made the dresses radical was not the citation. It was the translation. Saint Laurent did not print a painting onto fabric. Instead, he rebuilt it through cut, seam, and structure, forcing the body into the logic of modernist abstraction. The models became a moving composition, and walking turned into display. The dress reorganized the body through art rather than representing it.
That distinction sits at the center of the 2026 Met Gala, built around the exhibition Costume Art and the dress code “Fashion is Art.” The phrasing is direct, even confident. It also risks flattening a complicated relationship into a slogan. Fashion has long borrowed from art’s language. It speaks in terms of authorship, craft, and originality. It also answers to different pressures. It has to move, to sell, to circulate. The Met Gala turns this into spectacle, asking a red carpet built for speed and visibility to carry an argument that usually requires time and sustained looking.
The institutional context sharpens that argument. The gala, founded in 1948 by Eleanor Lambert, exists to fund The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fashion’s place in the museum was never guaranteed. It had to be staged into legitimacy through exhibitions, scholarship, and of course, money. That structure still holds, but the spectacle is the mechanism.
Now, with Costume Art inaugurating the new Condé Nast Galleries, fashion is not only inside the museum, it is repositioned at its center. The new space, spanning roughly 12,000 square feet just off the Great Hall, marks a deliberate shift away from the marginal positioning the department historically occupied. The exhibition becomes more than a show. It’s a direct statement about where fashion belongs.
What Costume Art does curatorially is just as important. Rather than isolating fashion within its own timeline, it stages it against 5,000 years of art history, pairing garments directly with paintings, sculptures, and anatomical studies. This is not a loose dialogue. It is a deliberate collapsing of hierarchy. Garments are placed on equal footing with objects that have long defined the canon.
The exhibition is organized through a taxonomy of bodies. The classical body and the nude sit alongside the pregnant body, the aging body, and the anatomical body. This structure reframes fashion history away from designers and toward embodiment. It also exposes a truth both art and fashion have long avoided. The canon has always been selective. Certain bodies have been aestheticized, while others have been excluded.
What is striking is how the exhibition resists the idea that fashion needs to be disembodied to be taken seriously. Traditional museum displays often isolate garments, presenting them as objects detached from the lived body. Costume Art moves in the opposite direction. Mannequins are elevated, mirrored, and staged in ways that draw attention back to the human form, encouraging viewers to see themselves reflected in the work. The body is not removed to elevate fashion, instead it is centered as the very reason fashion operates as art.
There is also a self-reflexive layer to the exhibition. By drawing from multiple departments within the museum, Costume Art turns the institution inward. It stages fashion against its own canon, asking where garments sit within a hierarchy that has long prioritized painting and sculpture.
There are precedents for this kind of positioning. Most recently, Schiaparelli’s exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum placed Elsa Schiaparelli within Surrealism through her collaborations with Salvador Dalí. These exhibitions build legitimacy through proximity. Fashion is placed next to art, read through it, elevated by association. The method works, but it also raises a question about dependency. If fashion needs art to validate it, what happens to its claim to autonomy?
Costume Art answers that question more directly. It does not ask to be read alongside art. It positions fashion as already embedded within the same continuum. The body becomes the connective tissue, linking garment to sculpture, movement to form, wearing to meaning. In this framing, fashion is not derivative. It is co-constitutive.
Designers like Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Yves Saint Laurent, among others, have already demonstrated that fashion operates through the same methods as art. They construct worlds, manipulate form, and use the body as medium. Their work does not sit adjacent to art. It functions within it. Alexander McQueen used the runway to stage narratives that engaged with history, violence, and identity. Yves Saint Laurent translated modern art into construction and Hussein Chalayan treated garments as systems that could shift between object, architecture, and performance. In each case, the work reshaped how the body functioned within the garment.
“Fashion is Art” works best as a proposition. It sets a standard that exposes the gap between intention and execution. The most compelling responses will likely come from those who treat the body as an active medium, where form, movement, and material produce meaning.
So as this Monday’s gala approaches, the question is not whether the Met Gala will prove that fashion is art. That work has already been done, historically, materially, and now institutionally. The question is what happens when that reality is staged in a format that prioritizes immediacy, and how clearly would this reflect through the guests. Would an art form built on movement, material, and time survive that translation?
Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dresses remain a useful measure because they resist that fade. They hold their reference while transforming it, asking the viewer to see the body differently. That is the level the theme points toward. Not a comparison between fashion and art, but an understanding that they already share the same ground.
The cultural logic of Corteiz x Gabriel Moses was never the question. Gabriel Moses is the Nigerian-British filmmaker and photographer whose brooding, precise visual language has shaped how a generation of Black British culture sees itself.From his short films to his editorial work, his lens carries a specific kind of authority that very few of his contemporaries have earned. He has directed for Corteiz, shot Rihanna, Lauryn Hill , Usher, Dave, Skepta, Rema, Louis Vuitton, Travis Scott , Wizkid and Solange received a co-sign from Pharrell Williams, and built a visual world so distinct that when his name is attached to something, it arrives with a reputation that precedes the work itself. Corteiz, the London streetwear label founded by Clint, built its empire not on advertising or accessibility but on community, scarcity, and a studied refusal to perform for anyone outside its own world. Two creatives who have never needed external validation to know their own worth. What a collaboration like this has to answer for is what it actually puts in your hands, and on that front, this one has less to say than it should.
The collection, available Friday, May 1 2026, at 7 p.m. London time on the Corteiz website centres on windbreakers carrying printed photographic imagery, Moses’ visual archive translated directly onto outerwear. His Torch Lady motif, the Columbia Pictures logo redrawn as a Black woman holding the flame, appears on the back of one piece. Alongside it: a Pan-African colourway windbreaker, a camo hoodie reading “It’s that real” in script on the back, a “Regina” track jacket, a “Director” piece, and a CRGA cap.
The campaign, shot by Moses and starring Moses, is exactly what you would expect. Brooding, precise, cinematic. South London walls. Bodies pressed against concrete. Within hours of posting to Instagram, it had pulled 23.2K likes. The images earned every one of them.
But images and garments are different things. Moses' Torch Lady is a loaded symbol, a deliberate rewriting of whose likeness gets to represent power and cultural authority. In his films, his photography, his editorial work, that image carries context and arrives with the full weight of his practice behind it. On the back of a windbreaker, that context does not automatically transfer. What was once a statement becomes a print. What was once a reclamation becomes something you can sell out in four minutes on a website.
It borrows the cultural weight of both names without doing the design work to justify the borrowing. Printed photography on outerwear is not a new idea. “Regina” on the back of a track jacket gestures at meaning without committing to one. The garments feel like they arrived at the concept and stopped there, as if the pairing itself was enough and the clothes were secondary.
Corteiz has always understood that the product has to match the mythology. The Nike collaboration delivered because Moses’ direction gave it a visual language they could live inside. Here, the visual language is doing all the heavy lifting while the clothes stand behind it, hoping proximity is enough.
The most telling piece in the collection is the camo hoodie reading "It's That Real" across the back. It is a declaration wearing the shape of an argument. But a slogan on a hoodie only works when the garment earns the words. This one does not. It assumes the cultural weight of both names will carry the claim across the finish line. For a collection built around an image as specific and loaded as the Torch Lady, that is the one thing it should never have relied on.
IG: @ffeistyhuman
It’s not Alté, it’s not Afrofusion, and it’s not the UK underground either. This is a whole movement of its own. We’ve been observing, we can feel it in our bones, but we haven’t been able to coin a term as a community just yet, while this underground soundwave is slowly boiling onto the surface. From Brotherkupa, Igwe Aka, Zaylevelten, Kayode, Paxslim and now PatricKxxLee–the UG (In short for underground music) movement has pushed niche African artists to be more creative and thoughtful about how they build an audience. We believe that Patrick, or R!CK, is at the forefront.
One thing about R!CK you must know is that he’s not new to this. He has been dropping music projects since the earliest of 2016. At the time, the US underground, or SoundCloud era, as some might call it, was booming, and all eyes were on this group of kids who seemingly had no care in the world and just wanted to make hit songs. Although we can not confirm, surely Patrick was inspired and wanted to live up to this momentum. Until now, we have begun to see the Zambian Boy benefitting from the fruit of his own labour.
To establish UG, not only will it take consistency and resilience, which are all things that Patrick has proven to have, but also the boldness to want to offer something different. While a set of genres work well and dominate the African continent, such as Afrobeats and Amapiano, taken from the spirit of both the US & UK diaspora, the underground scene sits on the underbelly and garners enough attention to be discussed. What sets UG apart is that they don’t cater to the music industry; they focus on growing a core fanbase, and whereas usually concerts and public appearances are the stronghold for an artist’s growth, the internet is their main stage.
Much like movements in the past, there are key elements we can already attribute to the main artists participating in UG. Those are: low-budget videos, nostalgic streetwear/Opium fashion, distinctive samples, African imageries and internet culture. That being said, it is not as easy as it looks, where one can simply group them all together and determine whether they will grow collectively or end up following different paths entirely.
Back to PatricKxxLee; he allows us to touch on a part of the world that most people know little of. Besides Zambian cloth, we don’t know enough about its culture, and music artists that represent the country. Patrick becomes the bridge to this reconciliation, and the fact that he has been repping his roots for so long and stands alone in amplifying the UG scene in Zambia makes it easy for him to stand out and conquer. From clips circulating online, we can see that Partick not only leads the new wave in his region, but also shows that there is a passionate Zambian audience seeking representation in the alternative soundscape.
Whether UG or underground music in Africa will truly take shape is yet to be determined; however, what we can be sure of is that its active members are working to make this movement last. For some, it might seem like yet another internet trend, destined to be placed on the curb as soon as another subgenre or subculture takes notice and people find a reason to become obsessed with it. But this is a real thing, and its audience is certainly there for the long run. From the online engagement, showing up to concerts and participating in the aesthetic, UG has a clear chance to make a lasting statement. Who knows? PatricKxxLee could be the voice that UG enthusiasts didn’t see coming.
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