How Kamara found his place in fashion
Designer from Sierra Leone is now editor of Dazed magazine
Ibrahim Kamara was sitting in a steamy hotel room in West Africa not long ago, reflecting on a fleeting visit to Gambia, a country he once called home. Born in Sierra Leone in 1990, Kamara fled to nearby Gambia after civil war broke out, spending much of his childhood with an aunt and uncle before settling in London with his parents at 16.
After years away, Kamara, known to friends as I.B., had returned for a visit with Senegalese photographer Malick Bodi. Kamara, now the stylist of choice for the likes of Virgil Abloh of Louis Vuitton menswear and Riccardo Tisci of Burberry, and recently named the editor of Dazed magazine, was in the process of retracing his past.
“I’ve been traveling by land and not air in Gambia for six days now, just driving through some of the places where I grew up and soaking it all in,” he said. “How I tell fashion stories has been shaped so much by my early life here, from my community upbringing and being so close to nature to early memories of glimpses of Western magazines and pop videos. I’ve been wanting to come back for some time now. Too long, actually.”
Time is not something Kamara, 31, has had of late. In an industry where talented creative people can toil for years before their first big break, his trajectory from a Central Saint Martins fashion communications graduate to one of the most in-demand young stylists has been meteoric.
At a moment when Black representation in fashion remains a work in progress, Kamara’s distinctive voice — he first drew attention in 2016 with “2026,” a striking London exhibition that explored the changing nature of Black African masculinity on street-cast models in Soweto, South Africa — is upending conventional notions of how fashion can relate to race, gender and sexuality.
Currently he styles runway shows and advertising campaigns for top heritage houses like Burberry and Louis Vuitton menswear, as well as Erdem, and past clients include Stella McCartney and Dior. His work has appeared in British Vogue, Vogue Italia, System, W and i-D, where he was a senior editor at large. And in January of this year, Kamara was appointed editor-in-chief of Dazed, a quarterly youth culture magazine.
“An Ib Kamara comes along once in a generation,” said Abloh, for whom Kamara also styles Off-White collections. “His work is a prime example of how diversity can bring out the best of the fashion industry.”
Beyond the covers
Kamara’s work tends to flirt at the intersection of raw realism, pop culture tropes and the alternative realities he creates. Of his debut covers for Dazed, one spotlighted suited Nigerian activists holding their national flag; another showed a young Black man in a Gucci tracksuit and hightops receiving an injection under the tagline “Freedom Is Coming But Where Are We Going?”
“Thank God Ib was not born in Britain,” said Lynette Nylander, the Dazed executive editorial director. Nylander, a former deputy editor at i-D and Teen Vogue, was hired alongside Kamara, who is dyslexic and for whom English is not his first language. The two had
bonded over shared Sierra Leonean roots when they met in 2016.
“There aren’t many of us in fashion,” Nylander said. “But Ib has always been a bit of an outsider, adopting a nonconformist perspective from the world at large and then bringing it inside the fashion establishment. He has such an innate sense of the future, and uses so much color, that his ideas then become almost impossible to ignore.”
Both editors talked about the challenges of shooting content in a pandemic, often using a young team
scattered across time zones. For Kamara, whose commercial projects for luxury brands have budgets that are often many times that of his magazine projects, the challenge of “learning how to be creative with nothing” has at times reminded him of his university days.
Young people are still looking to magazines, Kamara said. They just want to see themselves better represented. Which means looking beyond Paris, London and New York to often overlooked cities in Africa and Asia, using local
writers and photographers to spotlight those cultures, and then creating a dreamlike fashion universe to tell those stories.
“There’s an innocence and urgency that has remained untouched in Ibrahim’s work,” said photographer Paolo Roversi, a longtime collaborator, adding that he loved his friend’s ability to “create hats with pasta, or mix something found on the street with an haute couture outfit.”
The move to fashion
One distinctive thread running through much of Kamara’s work is his fixation with current affairs. It comes, in part, from his earliest memories in Africa and watching other worlds emerge through CNN and BBC. There is also a near forensic approach to detail, honed when he spent three years studying sciences to please his parents, who hoped he would become a doctor. Eventually, miserable, he moved toward fashion.
At one point he thought he wanted to be a designer, in order to explore what would ultimately become foundations of his work: notions of queerness, gender exploration and fluidity, as well as Black and distinctively African beauty. Then came a short and unsuccessful stint in public relations, before a pivotal job assisting Barry Kamen, the late stylist who was at the forefront of the 1980s Buffalo scene.
“I realized styling could be a quicker way to tell the stories I wanted to tell,” Kamara said, pointing to director Quentin Tarantino, composer Hans Zimmer and Diana Vreeland as inspirations, thanks to their ability to create immediately recognizable “worlds” that were distinctly their own.
Nylander said that while she and Kamara had both been “nervous” about their Dazed appointments, he had convinced her that it was not just an exciting opportunity but “one that was bigger than the both of us.”
The fashion industry as a whole is prone to the tokenization of Black talent. “Ultimately, there still aren’t many younger Black editors, especially at the top of the tree, who can make real decisions in magazines,” she said. “The mission now is to communicate well beyond art school kids and industry people.”