Iyá Àlàro | Members and Patrons

As someone whose focus is in fashion design, there‘s clearly a lack of care within the industry, ranging from lack of care around crop growth, chemicals used, mistreatment of workers, mass manufacture and overproduction, all the way through to racial, cultural and socioeconomic factors that affect who’s allowed access to the clothing industry. I wanted to look through the lens of ‘care’, exploring how fashion can become a ‘caring act’. ‘Care’ felt like an important value to place at the centre of fashion design, in place of the many capitalistic, colonial and patriarchal systems often centred in the apparel industry.

Abiola Onabule

Iyá Àlàro (_‘mother of indigo’/’head dyer’_) is a research and design project that explores concepts of care inherent in Nigerian textile craft, involving storytelling, conversation and local production. By investigating _adire_ – an ancient indigo-dyeing practice rooted in south-western Nigeria, commonly practised by Yoruba women and handed down from generation to generation – I wanted to investigate the creativity, heritage and social importance of _adire_ and local textile production. I wanted to approach making as a series of ‘caring acts’ that can create cultural exchange between a country and its diasporic communities. This iteration of the work explored some of these ideas through a womenswear collection and a film collaboration.

Abiola Onabule

I hope to build on this research and design exploration of indigo/_adire ‘tie-and-dye’_ by investigating and putting into practice ideas of communal/local/cultural practices inherent within adire culture, applied in different contexts, with different collaborators centering the importance of craft and artistry as acts of care, love and holistic support. In the long term, I would love to explore projects that create links between the diasporic community here and the amazing range of artisans, thinkers and storytellers in Nigeria, creating opportunities for cultural and creative exchanges that learn lessons from past textile and clothing stories, to produce new approaches for future needs.

Abiola Onabule

There's peace and focus working from home. But I think of clothing as half of the equation, that only truly comes to life when ‘in movement’, worn, and lived in. Designing with less access to community, conversation and collaboration complicated the process. Through learning more about _adire_ and indigo dyeing, I created my own version of an adire artisan’s indigo dye vat and workspace, tending to the dye daily. Inadvertently, I’d created an approximation of a dyers’ compound, attached to the home, similar in process and environment, to how my own great-grandmother would’ve worked, as an Iyá Àlàro (‘head dyer’).

Abiola Onabule