Kente Gents Lagos Spring 2024 Assortment

There’s a unused fashion designer on the town. Making his Lagos Style Occasion debut is Aristide Loua, the Ivorian founder of recent ready-wear-brand Kente Gents. He brings a unused allure to the time table with a set that blends conventional and recent design. Because the identify suggests, Loua’s items middle across the iconic Ghanaian textile Kente material. For him, the emblem speaks to a much broader objective of keeping but modernizing historical traditions and practices. The materials Loua makes use of are handmade through weaving communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, and given a contemporary contact through the usage of silhouettes that go beyond global borders.

Loua involves Lagos next successful the incubator programme, African Style Up, latter era, which is subsidized through the likes of Galeries Lafayette and Balenciaga. This LFW debut additionally marked a unused bankruptcy for Kente Gentleman as the emblem moved additional into womenswear. For fall, Loua has drawn from a quite odd inspiration: Robin Givens’s efficiency within the 1992 American rom-com Boomerang. “She was seen as a villain in the movie, but for me she was my heroine. She was a leader, someone who took charge,” he mentioned behind the scenes, recalling how the nature donned quite a lot of appears that includes outsized jackets, coats, and fits. “She created this new archetype of Black woman leads and I’m exploring that with this collection.”

This season Loua offered a unused development, which runs without difficulty right through the gathering, from cropped and outsized blazers to fitted clothes with deep but brilliant V-necklines. On the core of the lineup is his signature tailoring, daring colourful colours (or as Loua places it “royal colors”), in addition to hand tie-dyed natural yarn materials from Bassam in Côte d’Ivoire. One standout glance paired an asymmetrical evident wrap skirt with alike royal blue and red chequered trousers and a alike outsized, double breasted overcoat. Fashions walked indisposed the runway to the soundtrack, “Femme de Feu” through Gadji Celi, an Ivorian former skilled footballer grew to become musician.

Year there’s disagree predicting what is going to come later for the emblem, may a Balenciaga collaboration be within the playing cards? Because of his African Style Up win, Loua is these days taking part in mentoring classes with Balenciaga and says he’s “hoping for a small collection with the brand, so fingers crossed.”