Under the high-wattage glow of the runway, Nigerian models moved like living sculptures, draped in seemingly impossible yardage of fabric that had been folded, molded, and sculpted into gargantuan, architectural silhouettes. Other garments cascaded down their bodies in shingled, iridescent patterns that caught the light like the plumage of mythical birds.
The colourful, detailed textiles evoked Carnival — both Nigeria’s own, in the south-southern city of Calabar, and that of Rio de Janeiro fame — but were in fact splashing down a runway in Abuja, better known for being the seat of government than for avant-garde couture.
Nigeria Fashion Week, which wraps up Sunday, decamped from Lagos this year, trading the mega-city of more than 20 million — the nation’s economic and artistic capital — for the centrally planned administrative centre, which nonetheless has developed its own, smaller creative scene.
“Abuja is slow, slow in every way. People are very laid back,” Lexy Mojo-Eyes, the dapper organiser of the fashion week, who cut his teeth in Lagos, told AFP.
“We want to change the dynamics; we want to build Abuja as a fashion city.”
A Slowly Changing City
Nigeria officially moved its capital from thronging, crowded Lagos in 1991. But even in 2026, Abuja can still look half-built, its pockmarked downtown home to modern office buildings alongside empty lots and even farms that pre-date its founding.
It doesn’t have Lagos’ famous, and infamous, raucousness — but neither does it have a riposte to Lagos’ film industry, known as Nollywood, or its major corporate headquarters and roster of Afrobeats stars.
As Abuja has slowly filled in over the years, it has shed some of its sterile feel, hosting a photography festival, an international film festival and a burgeoning literary scene.
Part of the reason the show moved to Abuja was to increase dialogue between industry and government, organisers said.
“Government has to be that enabling environment,” including by reforming tourism and intellectual property law, culture minister Hannatu Musa Musawa said, wearing a metallic silver, pink and blue dress as she sat in the front row at a Friday runway show.
Libyan designer Rabia Ben Barka, whose models showed off similarly shimmering dresses, said she found Abuja — on her first trip to Nigeria — “so clean” and organised.
“Anyone who comes by, they greet you with ‘Good morning,'” said Ben Barka, considered the doyen of Libyan fashion and who once counted Muammar Gaddafi’s wife among her clients.
Some of her boxy silhouettes evoked retro women’s shoulder pads — and then, down the runway, strutted a man in a metallic silver-and-black pinstripe suit, complete with heeled leather shoes: souped-up businesswear for a capital city shedding its stuffy image.
Cost Of Living
Abuja is also drawing longtime Lagos players, including Chinwe Ezenwa, a handbag designer who opened a second factory in the capital in 2021.
“It’s a bit of a sleepy town,” Ezenwa, the CEO of Le Look, said. “But it’s picking up.”
Lagos, for its part, still retains its own, separate fashion week.
And whether Abuja can support the workers needed to run a creative sector — designers, fashion students and entrepreneurs — remains to be seen.
Many residents are already forced beyond the suburbs by brutal housing costs, and the government has come under fire for razing green areas, farms and “gardens” — cheap, open-air restaurants situated in parks — in favour of luxury development.
Despite the change in venue, some things are universal in Nigeria, whose creaking grid is as infamous as Lagos traffic: as the models prepped backstage Friday, came the darkness—a momentary, collective gasp before power roared to life and bathed the hall in brilliance once more.
Having survived its quintessential Nigerian baptism in blackout, the atmosphere shifted, and one attendee quipped that the show had just become “very authentic”.
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