LABRUM presented their AW22 Poetics Of Movement at London Fashion Week. It was a beautiful celebration of designer Foday Dumbuya West African heritage, in line with the integral ethos of the brand.
With a live story & choir performance, models walked down the runway in bold colorful looks inspired by the life and textiles of Dumbuya‘s motherland, Sierra Leone and the city of Freetown. Adjusting and readjusting to the quotidian West African lifestyle as the garments develop and the project comes to life in brilliant oranges, ocean greens and vibrant yellows.
Foday explores real-time examples of movement through the cities and people of the diaspora, be it the exchange of words or the transportation of fabric. This is a particularly important notion given the spiritual and cultural significance of West African cloth, an art form in itself, used to establish status and narrate tales through motifs and colours, amongst other things.
Featured on some of the Aishatu dresses and denim jackets are screen prints of hand drawn, and hand embroidered, Nomoli figures from the Mende and Kissi tribes of Sierra Leone. Their small stature belying their great significance.
This season LABRUM has collaborated with luxury leather goods brand Nosakhari to create three bag shapes for AW22; a heavy duty tote, a crossbody and a folio. Combining their design sensibilities and passion for detail, Nosakhari have used deadstock and leather off-cuts destined for the waste fields to create these bags. A responsible solution to reduce waste. They have also utilised off-cuts of fabrics used in the LABRUM design studio. The crossbody and folio appear in two distinct styles, a sophisticated camo print and repurposed patchwork, both feature minimalist brass hardware. that come in five sophisticated colour combinations.
Poetics of Movement deliberately incorporates points of familiarity in West African culture, looking at museum archives from places such as the V&A and drawing colour inspiration from artist Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, which has influencer the colour palette this season. In doing so, LABRUM aims to establish that movement has always been a thing of importance. Inspired both in theory and in practice by the nature of change: movement in life, movement as life.
Photo by Joe Maher/BFC/Getty for BFC
Images by Joe Maher/BFC/Getty for BFC