Damilola Hadijat Sanni Has Found Her Argument in Fashion and We Love It

There is a designer working in Lagos who understands that a single garment idea, pushed far enough, becomes a philosophy. Damilola Sanni proved that at the APFPN 2022 showcase, and the capsule collection she built with Fruché was one of the more convincing arguments made on a Lagos runway this year. It was not a large collection. It did not need to be.

Sanni’s obsession across the collection is the shirt. She takes it apart, wraps it, knots it, slashes it, lets it trail. The premise sounds simple. The execution is not. What she manages, look after look, is to make each intervention feel necessary rather than decorative. The fabric is not being manipulated for effect. It is being interrogated for meaning.

The red look does this most dramatically, a shirt dress cinched and bound into a corseted silhouette with fabric tails falling loose and rosette detail at the shoulder. It wears urgency well and carries the kind of deliberateness that separates a strong collection from a merely pretty one. The emerald green piece is the technical peak, knotted and cut away into something sculptural. The midriff exposure is not provocation..

The all-black menswear entry deserves its own mention. Wide trousers, a layered mid-length skirt and a slashed long-sleeve shirt worn together with the ease of someone who has thought carefully about weight and proportion. It opens the collection with the right kind of quiet and establishes early that Sanni is not interested in loudness for its own sake.

If there is one reservation, it is that the blue closing look, charming as it is with its crystal-edged petal panels, reads slightly lighter in ambition than what came before it. It is pretty where the rest of the collection was pointed. A small complaint against an otherwise focused body of work.

Sanni knows what she is working with, and more importantly, she knows why. That clarity is rarer than it should be.