Mowalola Ogunlesi has a well-earned reputation as one of London’s few remaining fashion provocateurs. Previous runway spectacles—which typically happen off-schedule, close to midnight, and in far-flung industrial areas of the city—have featured everything from models sporting faux car-crash bruises and prosthetic wounds to Ogunlesi herself taking to the stage and performing a raucous live set of her own music, before barreling into an all-hours after-party rave.
Which made tonight’s show a little surprising. First, the location: a grand Neoclassical office building in Westminster, just steps from the Houses of Parliament and the heart of British political power—certainly a lot more genteel than her previous venues in warehouses and nightclubs. This was deliberate: “I feel like over the years, I’ve done so many collabs, and been pushed in different directions, and I’ve been trying to find myself. Right now, I feel really good about where I want to go, and very intentional about it. This is Mowalola through and through,” Ogunlesi said after the show. As for what defines Mowalola: “Sex, glamour, decay, raw… the party, the club.” That sounds about right.
This was Ogunlesi’s first runway show in two years, and she made it count. After attendees finished smoking cigarettes on the balcony and found their seats, a remix of “Born Slippy” blasted over the speakers, and their feet began tapping the blood-red floors, stained with black smears and left with glossy pools of spilled drinks on the surface. (It was actually resin, and was meant to be there, I discovered when touching it before the show.) The first model out strutted through the suite of rooms in barely anything at all: a dress consisting of a mesh top, a satin skirt, and a slice of snakeskin as a belt, all in a punchy shade of crimson. (Followed by the same design in gunmetal blue and a metallic, shimmering taupe.)
This was the thesis of Ogunlesi’s collection: to strip back the theatrics and focus on the clothes. The looks were racy, but also, dare I say it, very sophisticated. Just take the strapless, floor-grazing sequin gowns in blue and brown that swished down the runway, or the superbly cast army of models that looked like the party girls (and boys) you’d naturally find dressed in Mowalola-inspired looks in clubs in London and Ogunlesi’s hometown of Lagos. “I realized I’ve been doing this for 10 years, so I wanted to look back at everything and return to what made me want to do this in the first place, and reignite that love for creating and designing and building worlds,” she said. “I wanted to refine everything and let the clothes and shapes speak for themselves, and let the models transform into these real characters.”
There were characters aplenty—femme fatales, club kids, red-carpet sirens, even office workers heading off for a debauched night out, already half stripped down to their lingerie. But by doing away with her signature playful logos (which, one imagines, was a tough decision, given Ogunlesi’s masterful knack for branding), the focus lay solely on the clothes. The results were impressive: Expertly cut men’s tailoring in high-gloss waxed cotton and foiled denims; bra and skirt sets in glitter-coated canvas; a finale look of a dress made from smashed plastic plates by the costume jeweler Tô Genesis, here transformed into gleaming paillettes that snaked their way around the model’s body. (And if you thought a bumster wasn’t risqué enough, Ogunlesi sent her butt-flashing looks out in sheer organza.)
For Ogunlesi, the spirit of the collection was celebratory: “I love shape. I love the human body. And I think me evolving as a woman, and thinking about what I actually want to wear, helped prompt this push,” she said. Here’s to another decade of Mowalola, a brand that always keeps us on our toes.
