‘THE DRESS COMES OUT OF PAIN’
Designer Patience Torlowei creates fashion from the highs and lows of life in Africa
This sleeveless gown with the hand-painted train is a conversation — about the violence man has committed against the Earth, as well as the beauty that springs from it.
The dress’s dazzling bodice has a metallic glint, as if it was spun from strands of 22-karat gold. The skirt is an artist’s canvas — an achingly visceral landscape of red flames, puce-coloured water, a hazy sun, grey smoke, rusted pipes and brown torsos etched with muscles. At a glance, the gown is a stunning example of one-of-a-kind fashion. But really look at it and the dress expresses the richness of Africa’s natural resources, its bloody conflicts, the blithe despoiling of its communities and the toll that such degradation takes on the people.
The dress communicates in long, emotional paragraphs a story that its designer Patience Torlowei, who was born in Enugu, Nigeria, knows intimately. Growing up so close to the country’s oil-producing region, she saw the havoc that the drilling and the subsequent spills of poisonous crude have had on the surrounding environment. “Small lakes, from one day to the other, the fish would all be dead. All these things could be destroyed overnight.
“The dress,” Torlowei says, “comes out of pain.”
But it also comes from her heart and from the well of creativity that Torlowei, an established fashion designer, brings to everything, from this one-of-a-kind meditation on the environment to practical lingerie.
The gown, named Esther, is part of I Am ... Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, which runs through July 5, 2020, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. The dress occupies the middle of the exhibition’s main gallery, where it is surrounded by the work of other African female artists who explore identity through portraiture, sculpture and video art. Esther, however, holds the distinction of being the first example of modern designer fashion to be added to the museum’s permanent collection.
The dress joins an archive of African textiles and historical garments. The museum was not avoiding contemporary attire, but “high fashion can be an expensive territory to enter,” says curator Karen Milbourne. Torlowei made Esther a gift to the delighted museum.
“That gown is a work of art,” Milbourne says.
The museum refers to the dress as “couture,” but Torlowei knows Esther doesn’t meet the prescribed standards of haute couture as set by Paris, which essentially says that if a garment is not crafted by a designated couture house, then it’s not couture. It’s just fashion. And Torlowei is admiring and respectful of the lineage of a term that speaks of Hubert de Givenchy, Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel and Christian Dior.
“I’ve always loved fashion: Dior, the style of Saint Tropez. I’m not going to classify it as couture. Couture is couture,” Torlowei says.
She originally created Esther for a fashion show that accompanied the museum’s 2013 exhibition Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa. Those were tumultuous times for Torlowei. Her mother had recently died and the dress was named after her. But the name also calls to mind the story of the biblical figure who saved the Jews from death and who has become a symbol of salvation through the power of language.
Torlowei speaks through the language of fashion. Esther is her poetry. Her other work, while no less meticulously crafted, is prose.
At 55, Torlowei is a fashion designer stepping into the light of the western fashion world at a time when the industry is searching for new markets, welcoming more diverse voices and striving for inclusiveness — not so much out of moral rectitude but because it is good business. Gucci, for example, has developed scholarship programs in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, among other countries.
This year’s shortlist for the LVMH Prize for new designers includes representation from Nigeria and South Africa. And brands such as Brother Vellies and Lemlem have tapped into the artisan traditions in Africa. Torlowei’s ready-to-wear line focuses on lingerie and merges techniques that she learned working in Brussels with the esthetics of her Nigerian birthplace.
Torlowei spent more than 20 years in Brussels. Her husband didn’t want her to work outside the home and so she became a stay-athome mother of two yearning for a creative outlet. She began teaching herself how to make lingerie, particularly the way it was done in the 1920s. She loved its fragility and intimacy.
In 2008, she spent about six months working in the atelier of a seamstress whose family’s roots in the craft went back generations. “She taught me without reservation. She answered every question,” Torlowei says. “Not many people want you to know everything about how things are done. But lingerie-making is moving to China. She was glad to teach me.”
Through it all, Torlowei was building a business focused on high-end lingerie and loungewear. (Her marriage dissolved in 2003.) After some success in Belgium, Torlowei moved back to Nigeria. In what she calls Phase 2 of her life, she decided to create an Africa-based luxury line that catered to African women. What she discovered in Nigeria was a lingerie market that was colloquially referred to as BDS, or “bend down and select.” Women were buying used lingerie from vendors who spread their wares on a sheath of plastic that was unfurled on the ground.
“You’d see working women in beautiful outer garments who were wearing second-hand lingerie,” Torlowei says. “It pained me. I said I have to change what I wanted to do.”
So instead of focusing solely on one-of-a-kind or special-order pieces, Torlowei decided to offer everyday lingerie that was indulgent and stunning.
Torlowei’s collection comes in deep jewel tones and delicate pastels. Some of it is embellished with lace and marabou. Other pieces have discreet pleats, judicious embroidery and a sweet daintiness that makes each camisole or pair of tap pants feel like a special treat.
She recently showed the collection at Lagos’s Arise Fashion Week, which has begun to attract interest from around the world.
Torlowei met fashion editor André Leon Talley at a panel discussion. He was impressed enough by her work that he hosted a dinner in her honour the day after the September fashion shows finished in New York.
“Her work stands out as she takes lingerie and intimates to a high level of design that blurs the lines between the duality of fashion,” Talley writes in an email. “In other words, a slip is not just a slip; a camisole with lace motifs can be worn as luxury clothing, a kimono wrapper translates into private dressing or dinner dressing.”
In what is now, perhaps, the third chapter of her professional life, Torlowei is in the centre of one of the fashion industry’s leading stories: the rise of Africa.
She wants to give African women the pampering associated with beautiful lingerie and she wants to do so using the skills of Nigerian seamstresses. Along the way, she hopes to demolish stereotypes about what African consumers want and what homegrown brands can deliver.
A brand “coming out of Africa, people don’t expect it to be perfect,” Torlowei says. “We have to change that expectation.”