Tomi Famadewa Wants To Bridge Alternative and Traditional Yoruba Fashion

Tomi Famadewa looked at the sprawling mirror in front of her and saw a face she could not recognize. The eyes—dainty and doe-like—were unmistakably hers, as were the small nose and lips, which were lacquered in a subtle red lipstick. And yet, as the onigele carefully sculpted an intricate pink gele over her head, she struggled to parse the disparate facial features in front of her into a coherent understanding of a face, her face. A white fan buzzed overhead, working frantically to distribute air in the dingy salon. Out of the corner of her eyes, Tomi could see her mother seated on a high-backed chair, and her two sisters—they were all draped in the same sequined purple dress she wore. Minutes before then, they had frantically set out in search of a salon, as the onigele they originally booked was running late. 

“I remember looking at myself and thinking, ‘Wow, this is very nice. This is very beautiful.’ But it did not feel like me. I felt like my whole aesthetic was whitewashed,” she tells me one rainy afternoon in September. As she recalls it, her dress was pretty. It looked like the typical owanbe dress, complete with a corset and hourglass silhouette. Similarly, her makeup was an incarnation of the famed Instagram baddie look: thick, sculpted brows, long lashes, and a formidable layer of foundation to blot out imperfections. What she said next left me gobsmacked. 

“As I looked at myself in that long mirror, I thought, ‘Wow, this is really pretty, but God damn, this is not me.’ If the makeup was really ugly or something like that, maybe I could be like, ‘Okay, well that was it.’ But I generally thought that it looked nice.’ In that moment, she tells me, she felt experiences from her childhood surge through her mind with revelatory force. 

Tomi Famadewa—a creative director, stylist, and apparel artist who has worked with a dazzling cast of creatives—among them Odunsi, Zhus, Fido, Goodgirl LA, and Luwa.mp4—had grown up an odd kid. Not just among friends and peers from school but within her own family. “I was called weird by everyone because, apparently, I was a weird child. I’m not going to disagree with that, but the feelings cut a little deep because the first people to see me primarily as weird were my family, specifically my mom.”  Her voice takes on a more serious tone, but she doesn’t seem bitter or spiteful; if anything, she radiates a preternatural calm. 

As a child, she was drawn to all things dark and gothic, as well as a constellation of things under the alternative umbrella—including Animé and Japanese culture. She also held a fascination for Yoruba culture, particularly the Yoruba myths. She would obsess over Yoruba Orishas to the point where she’d find herself writing poems about them. While many parents would stop at registering dissatisfaction with an odd child through resigned attempts at correction, Tomi’s eccentricity put her fundamentally at odds with her mother. 

Mother-daughter tensions are a well-worn trope in fiction. But it’s also a motif that threads through the lives of many creatives. Consider Arundhati Roy, writer of the 1997 Booker Prize winner The God of Small Things, who describes her relationship with her mother as being at once a “shelter and a storm.” Like Royi, the tension between Tomi and her mother was less a function of antagonism as it was a battle of worldviews, of fundamental truths. Tomi, who likes to wear her natural hair in an afro, and is not just alternative in terms of style but in the way she sees the world, describes her mother as a “typical upperclass Yoruba woman.” 

“Everyone looks at my mum as this pinnacle of fashion,” Tomi tells me. “Everything she wears is tailored well, and she enjoys collecting high-end perfumes, among other things. When we were younger, she put us in etiquette classes and would fuss over how we sat or held our forks. I guess she wanted a child who would be a version of her. And quite frankly, that wasn’t me. I came out wanting to wear sneakers with my dress—yes, very Camp Rock style. We would get into fights a lot about my style or compare me to my friends. Sometimes she would look at me and just say, ‘Tomi, you are weird.’”

It’s possible that others in the salon had their minds trained on the wedding they would attend later that day, but as she gazed at her unfamiliar reflection, Tomi began hatching early plans for her new fashion line, BowoDiesAlone, which launched on October 1st with a proto-collection. The initial plan was to make traditional Yoruba attire reflecting her alternative sensibilities for herself, then it grew to accommodate “members of my community,” before she finally settled on releasing a collection. 

The initial thrust for the collection was her personal indignation, she says. “I think it just felt really unfair,” her voice now bristling with something akin to holy fervor. “Why does it feel like to participate in Yoruba culture, this traditional wedding, I have to basically erase myself? Where is the middle ground in that? Because culture is constantly evolving, even the corsets, which have become a fixture in owanbe attire, are an evolution of what they originally were. It feels like regular people got their evolution, but alternative people were meant to—for that day only—cover up everything that makes us who we are. So I started thinking, ‘I’m a designer, I see a gap in the market and I can fill it.’”

In creating the collection, she turned to Japan, which has a thriving alternative scene that exists alongside traditional Japanese culture, for inspiration. “I saw people wearing Kimonos with alternative aesthetics—Lolita, Harajuku. They could wear their traditional attire but still look like themselves.” 

The collection has a dark, brooding complexion, blending elements of goth-punk with the traditional Iro and Buba silhouette—black, frilly lace, geles adorned with spikes, black roses, a choker, and the tour de force: an ipele—typically a piece of cloth draped over the shoulders as an accent to the traditional iro and buba—fashioned out of interlocking safety pins. 

Safety pins and similar silvery objects are a recurring motif in her work, taking whatever form she summons them into—vests, scarves, neckpieces. When I poke her about their origins and significance in her work, she replies, asking if I know what an abiku is. I nod in affirmation, but all the same, she offers a comprehensive explanation. “In traditional Yoruba philosophy, abikus are children who constantly die and are reborn. Obviously, with the advent of modern medicine, we know that these were probably children with Sickle Cell disease. So, I have sickle cell, and the thought behind abikus is that they are malevolent spirits that infect pregnant mothers and take the place of their children. So women with a history of being plagued by these spirits would wear a safety pin or a similar shiny object to ward them off. Once I saw my mother wear one, I asked her about it, and she told me the whole story. That informed my choice to incorporate them in my work.”