People
Funke Aramide and the second life of adire
From an Abeokuta dye yard to the order books of Paris — how one Lagos label is rewriting the price of African cloth.
by Amara Okafor
Amara Okafor is a senior writer at The Front Row Africa, where she covers the designers, editors and executives shaping the industry.
A version of this profile appeared in Front Row Circle, our newsletter on the people, power, business and culture shaping African fashion. Subscribe here.
On a Tuesday morning in Abeokuta, Funke Aramide is elbow-deep in an indigo vat, checking the bloom on a length of cloth that will retail, finished and tailored, for more than most of the city pays in rent.
The 34-year-old founder of Aramide — the label whose hand-dyed adire opened last October’s Lagos Fashion Week — has spent six years arguing that the continent’s oldest cloth deserves its highest price tag. This season, the order books finally agree.
The argument was never really about fashion. In Aramide’s telling, a yard of hand-resisted indigo is a ledger of labor — the paste-work, the folding, the seven days of oxidising in the sun — and for decades that ledger has been settled at a discount. Her label exists to collect the balance.
She learned the resist technique at her grandmother’s dye yard and walked away from a consulting career to formalise it — signing forty artisans to fixed contracts, printing the dyer’s name on every garment label, and refusing wholesale terms that priced the cloth like commodity yardage.
The bet is paying off. Her spring order book has tripled, driven by what one Johannesburg retailer described as a continental
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