The Cost of Nigeria’s $4.5 Billion Fashion Industry

For three weeks now, a 14-minute documentary has been quietly circulating, carrying voices that have been systematically silenced. Model Citizen—the title itself a deliberate double entendre—presents what appears to be a celebration of exemplary professionals. Look closer, and you’ll find something more urgent: a damning exposé of an industry built on the bodies of those it refuses to protect.

Released by Aniyota Media, the documentary opens with a statistical quote: “Nigeria’s fashion industry is valued at $4.5 billion.” It’s a figure that speaks of glamour and cultural influence. But the opening quote doesn’t stop there. It continues with a truth that the industry has worked hard to keep backstage: “Despite this, models, key contributors of the local industry, are subjected to low pay, subpar treatment, and even sexual assault.”

The film’s structure is deliberate in its irony. We watch Nkem Okoroafor, Ifeoma Nwobu, and Arafat Adele, and other models, do what models do: twist, pose, smile for cameras. Then the frame shifts. The same women who moments ago performed aspirational beauty now speak about exploitation, neglect, and an industry that treats them as disposable.

In recent years, the global modeling industry has faced increasing scrutiny over working conditions, from France’s 2017 law requiring models to prove their health to protect against eating disorders, to the #MeToo movement’s revelations about systemic sexual abuse in fashion capitals. Yet these conversations have largely centered on Western markets. Model Citizen reveals that while international fashion has been forced into uncomfortable reckonings, Nigerian fashion has continued operating in the shadows of accountability, replicating the same exploitative structures without facing the pressure for reform.

One of the documentary’s most striking revelations concerns pay disparity based on body type. Plus-sized models, the women explain, face systematic wage discrimination compared to their thinner counterparts. While global fashion has made performative gestures toward body diversity, launching “inclusive” campaigns that generate positive press, Model Citizen exposes the economic reality behind the imagery: plus-sized models are paid less for the same work, their bodies deemed less valuable even as brands profit from the appearance of inclusivity.

Perhaps most chilling is what happens to models who dare to advocate for themselves. Several women describe being blacklisted—effectively exiled from an industry that is often their primary source of income—simply for demanding basic dignity or fair treatment. This echoes a pattern seen globally, from Hollywood’s decades-long silencing of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers to the fashion industry’s own history of punishing models who spoke out about abuse. But in Nigeria’s less regulated market, where formal labor protections for models are virtually nonexistent and industry associations remain weak or non-existent, the path to justice is more elusive.

The documentary also illuminates the psychological warfare waged on these women’s sense of self. Models speak candidly about body dysmorphia, the distorted, often agonizing relationship with one’s own body that develops when your physique is constantly scrutinized and found wanting. This isn’t unique to Nigerian models; studies globally have shown that models experience eating disorders at rates significantly higher than the general population. What Model Citizen portrays is how these psychological harms intensify in contexts where models have even less support, fewer resources for mental health care, and an industry culture that views their suffering as the acceptable price of beauty. More disturbing are the testimonies about prostitution, the unspoken expectation that models, particularly those struggling financially due to exploitative pay structures, should make themselves sexually available to secure work. 

What makes Model Citizen particularly significant is that it arrives at a moment when global conversations about labor exploitation have expanded beyond traditional sectors. We’ve seen renewed attention to garment workers’ rights, to the exploitation of gig economy workers, and to the precarity of creative labor. The modeling industry, however, has occupied a strange space in these discussions: visible enough that everyone knows the work, invisible enough that the workers themselves remain unprotected. These women exist in a peculiar purgatory: their images are everywhere, selling everything, embodying aspiration itself, yet their actual conditions of labor remain largely unexamined.

For 14 minutes, Model Citizen insists that we see not just the carefully constructed images that sell clothes and perfume and aspiration, but the human beings behind them, the women who are exploited, blacklisted when they resist, underpaid based on arbitrary body standards, coerced into sexual compromise, and psychologically damaged by an industry that profits from their vulnerability. A $4.5 billion industry should be able to afford dignity for its workers. This documentary makes painfully clear that Nigerian fashion continues to operate with impunity. It remains yet to be seen whether this will finally change, or whether these voices, like so many before them, will be absorbed back into the silence.