Before Bolapsd built a brand entirely on his own, his eye for the polo was already taking shape inside someone else’s label. At Ashluxe, the Lagos-born luxury streetwear house, Bola (real name Adebola Olaniyan)  worked across two collections that sharpened his design instincts considerably. Olympiad 1.0 launched in 2023 with cycling jerseys, Muay Thai shorts and football-style jerseys, leaning into the kind of athletic referencing Ashluxe had already built a reputation around. Olympiad 2.0 followed in 2024, adding crest logo polos and racing-striped polo T-shirts to that existing identity, a refinement of the sportswear language Ashluxe was known for rather than a reinvention of it. Bola launched his own label, Bolapsd, in 2023 while still working within Ashluxe, the two practices running alongside each other before one eventually became the focus.

The first Bolapsd designs leaned into a rockstar edge that never quite fit. Two months in, he stripped the brand back to clean silhouettes and everyday fits, built around his own taste rather than a target audience. The polo emerged from that recalibration - collared, crest-branded, carrying the slogan “This Life I Live Is Forever” and an est. MMXXIII marking his own timeline. It was quiet until Rema wore it in his “Fun” video, a placement Bola had anticipated but which landed with more force than expected. The polo became the brand’s defining piece almost overnight, reissued repeatedly in new colourways, each release functioning less as a reprint and more as a continuation of the same idea.

Bola has never hidden the reference. In December 2023, previewing an upcoming polo, he wrote plainly: “This is Lacoste, Ralph Lauren type fabric. so you know what I’m doing.” The material was the inspiration, openly stated, not the design itself - the piece he revealed carried his own crest, his own slogan, “This Life I Live Is Forever” stitched across the chest, an est. MMXXIII marking his own brand’s timeline rather than anyone else’s. That distinction got lost when the conversation resurfaced in April 2026, after an account shared a TikTok showing people wearing lookalike versions of Bola’s own polo. The accusation flipped entirely. One reply summed up what the moment actually proved: “More like Bola ‘referenced’ Ralph Lauren to make his own polo, nuance matters. This person COPIED Bola PSD, same text, same colors, same everything bro. Nobody is saying Bola invented Polos but come on, you guys are trying so hard to not see the real problem here.” What began as an open acknowledgment of material inspiration had, three years later, become proof of the opposite accusation entirely.

Bola first showed the pink polo at the Homecoming Summit 2026 on April 3rd, speaking as part of the streetwear panel. The release itself wasn’t confirmed until June 30, with the piece going live for sale Friday, July 3. It marks the polo’s first version designed explicitly with women in mind, a deliberate expansion rather than an afterthought. Bola has spoken openly about wanting to design for women for some time, framing the brand as something built for everyone rather than a single aesthetic crowd. “It’s a brand for everyone, not just a specific crowd,” he said of that philosophy, one that now extends past skull caps and ribbed T-shirts into the piece that defines him most.

His reference points trace back further than Lagos streetwear. Bola has named Virgil Abloh as the single biggest influence on how seriously he approached fashion in the first place, mirroring Abloh’s Canary Yellow graphic design archive with his own early portfolio work. The same polo, reissued and recoloured across years and now reflected in other brands’ work, has become less a single product and more a recurring statement.

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