The Surge Of Overpriced “Luxuries" In Nigerian Fashion

                   image credit: pinterest 

By Precious Idowu

Fashion is a statement. It is the way people speak without using words but their appearance. It has always been a statement of identity relayed through the use of fabric, adornments and style. Whether stitched in cultural heritage or reinvented for trend’s sake, clothing carries more than just bodies. It carries meaning. And more recently, it has also carried a beautiful price. 

In the Nigerian fashion community, particularly the circles of young and uprising fashion designers, a rather interesting take on creativity and cost has emerged. A wave of pieces, often simple in style and modest in creativity, now appear with staggering price tags. A basic T-Shirt with nothing more than the creator’s logo sells for tens of thousands. A boubou dress gets classified as luxury and given a cultural name like the Dedewe or Adanna dress and all of a sudden the price tag reads ₦450,000. A palazzo trousers and blouse co-ord made with Ankara gets named the Ogolomma or Batuke set and goes for well over ₦300,000. These pieces would sometimes have neither intricate beadwork nor complex tailoring present. They would consist of just fabric, a cultural name and a price that suggests luxury and exclusivity.

The emergence of fashion pieces is no longer just about the design, the “branding” has become a key focus. What makes a kaftan worth hundreds of thousands is not necessarily the cloth, the cut or its designa, it is the name it carries and the image it projects. A Yoruba or Igbo name adds a layer of cultural sophistication, an illusion of storytelling, and just like that, a piece many would have walked past in the market becomes a “luxury piece.”

The rise of independent Nigerian brands has certainly played a role in this. Young designers, many of them actual fashion creatives or business-inclined masking as creatives, have learned the language of luxury Nigerians speak. The product itself is only one aspect of the language; the pricing, presentation and exclusivity do the rest. And while some pieces do showcase impressive craftsmanship, others seem to rely solely on the magic of perception.

Fashion in this context is not only about clothing pieces. It is also about belonging. When someone buys a ₦195,000 Temitope set, they buy not just the outfit but the satisfaction of purchasing a luxury item. They are buying the aesthetic of wealth and the performance of class, two things that are not new to the fashion world at large. 

 Many of the pieces now deemed high fashion are rooted in the ordinary. They borrow from everyday styles like the bubu cuts, iro and buba, oleku which are forms of fashion that the average Nigerian is familiar with and in possession of. Now, these familiar forms are dressed up in curated photoshoots and launched with captions like “meet our exclusive set” and “limited drops.”

The price tag for these pieces is certainly not tailored to the pockets of the average Nigerian. Perhaps it is to the set of Nigerians who move in creative or elite circles, attend gallery events and the likes or perhaps the “far from home” Nigerians. For them, such clothing, albeit overpriced, serves as visual identity and satisfies their sense of belonging. 

And perhaps none of this is surprising. Every generation finds new ways to assign value. For some, it was embroidery. For others, imported lace. For this one, it might just be the name. The branding.

This new system adopted by Nigerian designers has considered value to be less about how the durability of a piece, the expected quality of the fabric or detailed and intricate its construction and design is. It has become more about how much the members of the general public talk about it and more importantly, the numbers on the price tag.