What if African fashion existed beyond Western validation – outside museum walls, detached from colonial timelines, and sovereign?
Cr.: Iyke Ibeh
This question animates Bernard Dayo’s forthcoming indie styling video, a two-minute conceptual cosplay inspired by African designers across Lagos, Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Casablanca. Rather than imitation, the project performs speculative continuity, imagining what African aesthetics and politics might look like if unbroken by colonial interruption.
Titled Styling African Designers, the work avoids simple utopia. Instead, it embraces tension, merging historical struggle with radical futurity. Through costume and movement, Dayo time-travels across political eras, hacking garments to rethink chronology, rebellion, and Africa’s role in shaping global consciousness.
The teaser poster shows only an upside-down image of a figure’s feet, a deliberate distortion of visual order. “It unsettles the viewer,” Dayo says. “It invites them to see African fashion through a nonlinear lens, one grounded in ancestral cosmologies.
Arriving October 27 on Dayo’s Instagram, TikTok, and X, the video marks the first chapter of a long-term styling universe. Recurring visual symbols will evolve across future works, shifting meaning in dialogue with political and spiritual themes.Drawing influence from scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Kodwo Eshun, as well as contemporary African activism and club culture, Bernard Dayo bridges theory and aesthetics. Formerly an editor and writer at OkayAfrica, he merges his background in media with a renewed commitment to fashion as resistance, memory, and imagination.
