For her Spring/Summer 2026 collection, Lagos-based designer Bubu Ogisi of IAMISIGO posed a question that would frame the entire show: “What does it mean to protect yourself and still remain open?” It’s a poignant question, particularly within the context of fashion’s Western hierarchy, in which Europe is still regarded as the dominant authority, and where designers from the Global South must often navigate the tension between safeguarding their cultural narratives and engaging with an industry shaped by colonial legacies. Bubu Ogisi expresses the multiplicity of being an African designer unconstrainted by borders, given she is Nigerian and lives between Lagos and Nairobi in Kenya, as well as having studied in Accra, Ghana; Ogisi thus draws on multiple threads and frameworks to underscore her broadened and deep vision for contemporary African fashion. 

Presented under the title Dual Mandate at Copenhagen Fashion Week, where IAMISIGO appeared as the recipient of the Zalando Visionary Award, an annual accolade introduced by Berlin-based ecommerce platform, celebrating emerging fashion designers who excel in creativity and design, innovation, and positive social impact, while meeting CPHFW’s rigorous sustainability requirements. IAMISIGO was named the 2025 recipient for its trailblazing use of African artisanal craftsmanship with modern textile innovation, its ethical sourcing practices, community empowerment efforts, and boundary-pushing designs.

Ogisi’s latest collection reasserts ancestral crafts as sartorial technologies and reframes a charged piece of colonial history. The phrase Dual Mandate originates from Lord Lugard’s infamous 20th-century text advocating for Britain’s colonisation of Africa. Where Lugard’s mandate was steeped in empire, Ogisi’s is a reclamation. Ogisi told Vogue Scandinavia that, “instead of using it to talk about empire, we turned it inward. What if duality could be sacred, not violent?”

Dual Mandate dazzled in its beauty and craftsmanship. IAMISIGO drew on a rich reservoir of African materials: Ugandan and Kenyan cotton, Nigerian raffia and jute, Tanzanian sisal, and employing all manner of techniques such as hand-weaving, chainmail forging, fibre knotting, glass blowing and hat-making by milliner Crystal Birch, each of these rooted in pre-colonial and indigenous practices. This forms what Ogisi denotes as “ancestral technologies”: functional, spiritual, and encoded with memory, utilised by the label to demonstrate Africa’s provenance in sartorial expression. 

For those new to IAMISIGO, Copenhagen offered a powerful spotlight to Ogisi’s practice, and it’s a vision that has travelled far. In 2024, IAMISIGO captivated audiences here in Cape Town at Confections x Collections at the Belmond Mount Nelson, bringing the same reverence for African craft to a South African audience.

African designers are commanding global attention as leaders for the future of fashion. Across the continent, designers are reasserting indigenous, sartorial consciousness, and challenging the industry’s Eurocentric lens, insisting on narratives that are authored from within. “The collection explores body, mind, spirit and emotion as intertwined terrains. Each piece is an instrument – meant to ground, to tune, to expand. It’s not about spectacle. It’s about energetic alignment.” Ogisi told Vogue Scandinavia. 

In Dual Mandate, the garments are built to be inhabited, their power revealed when worn, moved in, lived with. That openness – to craft, to story, to multiplicity – is what makes IAMISIGO’s CPHFW debut a titanic offering to the industry from the continent, and to anyone willing to understand fashion as equally a material culture and as an archive of spirit. In reclaiming the Dual Mandate, Ogisi proposes a new one: protect the self, remain open, and let beauty carry the memory forward.

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