Cerruti THE EYE. Dreams and visions of fabrics and more with Niyi Okuboyejo. From TECH to TEK.
My latest guest for The Eye Project of Lanificio F.lli Cerruti was Niyi Okuboyejo, and it was a real pleasure for me to have such a nice conversation with him. We had the chance to meet a few years ago, and I immediately fell in love with his way of treating fabrics mixing Western-style with African traditional dyeing techniques. An authentic fabric maniac.
Niyi Okuboyejo is a Nigerian/American designer based in Harlem, New York. Born in Lagos and raised in Texas, he studied Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design. Niyi has 10 years of experience in both menswear and womenswear working for brands such as Oscar de la Renta, Patrik Ervell and Yigal Azrouël. He also founded Post-Imperial, a menswear brand that is in 146 retail doors as has appeared in several established publications such as GQ, Highsnobiety and Hypebeast.
What is your relationship to fabrics? When I initially started this job, my approach to fabrics was more like to a resource that I used to create my products, as a resource I used to beautify my products. Now I think I’ve grown to a point where fabrics have much more value, it’s kind of humanizing materials. Now it’s more like something I see no more as a resource, but as a value, trying to use fabrics we can use at its full extent. Figuring out the best way to use the fabrics in different kind of products, not necessarily using them for one thing. Because when you start humanizing materials, it’s much easier to find out how to use them instead of wasting them. Something we realised is that designers waste a lot of materials, they often see fabrics as temporary resources, that are good for one season only, instead of something with a value on a long-lasting period. Because something gives life to fabrics. Whether we talk about the sheep we shear to get the wool, whether it’s silk, or the cotton plants to produce cotton fibres, some level of life was exhausted to make that fabrication, so they have a value, so we need to respect them.
Can you remember the first time you became aware of the features of a particular fabric? When I went to school, I studied womenswear, but at that time I was more familiar with menswear fabrics, so my approach to fashion was more coming from knowledge on traditional menswear fabrics, cotton, wool. When I went to work for Oscar De La Renta, I discovered fabrics like silk gazar, faille, satin, and I understood how fabrics can be used to beautify the body, and that fabrics were not something that can only be used for utility or experimentation. I realized fabric is something that can give people joy and the will to wear something. Something that Oscar did really well, and that I learned from him, was that you don’t necessarily change the silhouette, but you can use different fabrications to inject soul in a new form. A lot of women wanted to wear his clothing, and when they wore his clothing there was this sense of joy, it made them feel special. Getting in touch with those kinds of fabrics I realized how fabrics can make people feeling special with their touch, their textures, and how they can prettify the body and beautify it as well.
Where would you place the choice of fabric in the dynamics of your creative process? Do you start with the fabric and then decide what to make, or do you first have an idea for a garment and then look for the right fabric? When it comes to fabrication, I’m very mindful of the kind of fabrics we use, we always try to limit at most 4 fabrics per season that we use. There’s a standard fabric that we use in Nigeria called Funtua (Funtua is a base cotton fabric woven and developed mostly in the Northern part of Nigeria), and a voile and canvas cotton that we source depending on what we want to make. Then, each season we try to find new fabrics we can add to the collection to make different shirts or t-shirts; for instance, we added jersey as well. And, of course, we must pay attention to the prices. I know for instance I’m looking for seersucker or for velvet in a particular season, I know the price that I want, I know the products I want to use these fabrics for. And these boundaries I give to myself allow me to understand how I want to work for a season. Recently I started working with already existing fabrics. At the beginning of my career something I was always trying to do was to try to create fabrics from scratch, but for the last two years now I started realising I don’t really need to make anything from scratch, because almost everything is available. We have so many excess fabrics. I started taking into account deadstock options.
For me a crucial part of the development of a collection is the experimentation, so for me, fabrication plays a major role because it informs which kind of garment we want to make, how to make them, and we virtually spread it to almost all the categories. So, we try to limit the amount of fabrics we use, we increase the crossover fabrics, and we try to use the same fabrics for more seasons. Heavy corduroy can be used in Fall, and then we try to reuse them for the following Fall. I have the privilege to work on fabrics with different dyeing techniques, so I can dye the same fabric in different ways, and I have many ways to make it look new. That’s how we’ve been able to grow as a brand: using only a limited amount of fabrics and exploring the infinite ways to dye and to make them look new without wasting.
Do you have a favourite fabric, irrespective of the season? There are two I would like to mention: one is seersucker. I love seersucker, it has a really nice texture. It doesn’t translate properly in the market in Fall, but if I would be able to change the world, I would like seersucker to be sold throughout all seasons. Even myself I don’t wear it as a seasonless fabric, because I’ve been conditioned too as well, but I always look forward to Spring, and when I realise the weather is less cold, I tell to myself: “ Oh, yes, it’s time to wear my seersucker!”.
Another fabric I love is raw silk or Burrati Silk. Burrati Silk is a kind of raw silk, specifically for ties. And I like raw silk because it doesn’t look perfect. When people think about silk, they think of it as smooth, because it has that drapey nature, but raw silk is not like that, it’s very course, it’s very rough. And I love that, I love the fact it’s not perfect, it has all these rough textures. I just love the idea of having texture with silk. Silk has this drapey property that most fabrics don’t necessarily have, and raw silk to a degree does have that, but I love how it looks on a tie, on a jacket; it looks beautiful.
If you were a fabric, which type of fabric would you be? I would be seersucker. Seersucker has the personality I would like to embody. That sense of making people happy. It has character, it’s very textured, in some ways it’s something I want to embody. Corduroy would be my version of seersucker for wintertime. Corduroy is much more built for toughness. Corduroy is much more paternal in the way it protects, and seersucker is more maternal.
And if you could have your dream fabric made, what would you ask for? It’s a very difficult question, but if I would have to ask for one, it would probably be a kind of Autumn/Winter seersucker. Seersucker does not only have texture, but it has a vertical striped pattern, and it’s a fabric that can be conservative and flashy at the same time. A solid seersucker would not stand out, but it flatters the body. And maybe it would be open weave, light, breathable, comfortable. I’m always looking for reasons to wear a jacket. When I’m in Nigeria since the weather is pretty hot when I meet people who are wearing a jacket, after a while, they take it off, and I’m the only one left with a jacket on. They usually wear British style jacket, very constructed ones, pretty heavy, so they look at me asking how I can feel at ease with my jacket despite the heat, and I always answer: “Because my jacket can breathe, it has no lining inside.” So, I see jackets as something that as to be light, something you should always be willing to wear, not to take off.
In your opinion, what characteristics will the fabric of the future have? I think the fabric of the future is a fabric that we already have. One of the things we have had to think about with COVID happening is “What the idea of innovation is”. We always think of innovation as something new, but I do think that this should not be the case. Innovation can also mean exploring alternatives that already exist. It would be great to create a kind of nylon that is waterproof, that has a lot of memory, but a lot of fabrics already have those properties. For instance, waxed cotton is already waterproof.
I’m not necessarily too fond of synthetic fibres or synthetic fabrics, but they exist, and they work pretty well. And the synthetic fabrics we have now can probably stand the apocalypse, and it takes a long time for them to biodegrade, so we already have fabrics that can meet the needs of the future now. This sense of innovation for the sake of innovation… I don’t know if we necessarily need that. So, what are the fabrics that we really need to move on?
I think that instead of focusing only on TECH, I also think we should also focus on TEK, Traditional Ecological Knowledge. Those are things that are coming from indigenous practices, and traditional techniques that still work today. But because of this sense of efficiency we crave today, they’re often discarded. The traditional dyeing techniques I use, different from the traditional silicon dyeing tech, are more on the TEK side and it works for us.
I actually think that’s a good time to look at the things we have around and say “Hey, why do we discard them?”. For example, your room is a mess and you think you don’t have clothes, and you go on buying clothes, but at a certain point you stop buying clothes and look around to see that you do have clothes - they’re all around on the floor. I think the fabrics we already have are the future. They are fabrics that can work for the future. They are fabrics that work for now. I don’t think it’s bad for us exploring new fabrics and new ideas, but I think that when we talk about innovation we need to find a balance between looking for new things but also exploring the things that are already available, because those new things we’re exploring and that we create, after 5 or 6 months only are discarded. And that doesn’t mean they didn’t work. They worked!
The idea of the solution-oriented mind frame we have pushes us not to realize that often when we try to solve problems, we just create other problems. Trying to find solutions with a bad mind frame means finding solutions that fit our idea of the solution, but at the end of the day, they create new problems. So, for me, the future of the fabrics are the fabrics we have today!
You can find the complete video of the dialogue with Niyi Okuboyejoi on the IGTV channel of Lanificio F.lli Cerruti.
Be ready for the next episode of The Eye, the series of dialogues I’m hosting with Fabric Maniacs, designers and professionals of the fashion world. It’ll be another great chance to see our sector with news eyes.