How Lagos Fashion Week began
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2011, Lagos Fashion Week debuted, putting Nigerian style on the map.
Omoyemi Akerele founded the event which helped to launch the careers of designers internationally.
It has grown into a major fashion event and won the 2025 Earthshot Prize for sustainability.
In 2023, Omoyemi Akerele spoke to Reena Stanton-Sharma about the first show.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: Founder of the Lagos Fashion and Design Week Omoyemi Akerele. Credit: Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP)
Transcript
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| 0:24.5 | A culture war about race, class, and who has the right to say what? |
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| 1:12.5 | But for now, let's get to the program. |
| 1:14.8 | We're taking you back to 2011 and the beginning of Lagos Fashion Week in Nigeria, |
| 1:19.7 | which brought together designers, models, stylists and fashion enthusiasts to showcase African |
| 1:26.2 | design and beauty on an international stage. |
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