DURO OLOWU
“I really want people to understand what fashion and the culture of style could mean if one thought beyond the usual boundaries but also always about the wearer.” Says Duro Olowu.
Duro Olowu is a Nigerian-born fashion designer and curator who is distinctively recognized for his innovative fusions of patterns and textiles. His daring designs reflect the deep assortment of his wide-ranging international background and experience.
Duro Olowu’s fashion career began in the late 90s when he swapped careers in London to start the women’s wear label, “Olowu Golding”, and opened a shop in Notting Hill. From the beginning, the designer’s self-taught fashion was bold, fresh, and elegant.
Since he launched his label in 2004, his designs have remained remarkably consistent. Known for his use of bright colors and patterns, he favors the sharply tailored silhouettes of his multicultural 1970s upbringing, including fitted jackets, precision-cut wide-leg trousers, billowing capes, and kimonos, and intricately cut yet liberating dresses with hemlines below the knee, all rendered in vivid and unusually mixed fabrics, patterns, and textures.
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According to Duro Olowu, he is constantly exposed to people who dress intentionally, presenting themselves in ways that spoke volumes about their identity. This includes not only his Jamaican mother who mixed clothes from Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche line with pieces made from fabrics she picked up in Nigeria, Switzerland, and London but also the other women who surrounded him as a child in Lagos, Nigeria, as well as his cousins and aunts in London.
As expected, Duro’s authenticity struck a chord in the fashion industry. After a year in business, he remarkably won the 2005 British Fashion Awards’ New Designer of the Year award becoming the only designer to have ever won this award before their first runway show. In 2019, Duro Olowu was included in the 2019 edition of the Power List, ranking the 100 most influential Black Britons.
Duro Oluwu tailors very notable clients such as the former United States First Lady, Michelle Obama. She regularly wore his designs and adored the designer greatly that he was fondly referred to as “Michelle Obama’s darling.” Other prominent clients include Princess Caroline of Monaco, Iman, Solange Knowles, Thelma Golden, Iris Apfel, and others.
Beyond fashion designing, Duro Olowu began curating modern art exhibitions in galleries and museums beginning with his exceptionally commended exhibitions, “Material” 2012 and “More Material 2014 at Salon94 gallery in New York. He curated his first museum exhibition in 2016, “Making & Unmaking” at the Camden Arts Centre in London which was well received.
More recently, in 2020, he curated his second museum exhibition, “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago”, featuring his selection of over 350 artworks from both the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago as well as other institutions and private collections in the city. This was the first time the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago appointed a guest art curator in its fifty years of existence.
Duro Olowu currently sits on the board of trustees of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Duro Olowu inspires us and we are so proud.