This Nigerian designer made a ₦11 million dress - is it worth it?

Last month, a lady shared on X (Twitter) that she found a dress that cost ₦11 million; this set off a discussion about how expensive Nigerian fashion designers sell their outfits, often starting from hundreds to millions of naira.

This particular dress is from a fashion brand known as House of Marvee, founded by Marvelous Olugu.

The dress comes from their SS24 collection and is known as “The Plait Dress,”.

It costs $6,967 (₦10,971,561) and is made from handwoven threads or fringes.

The sculpting and shaping of this dress is gorgeous. It also looks handmade, which requires a lot of effort, but notwithstanding, it costs way too much.

If you take a look at the website of the brand, you will see that most of their outfits are priced in dollars. The legal tender or currency for making transactions in Nigeria is the naira and not the dollar.

This brand is domiciled in Nigeria, with its head office at Ikeja, Lagos, so it begs the question; why are the outfits priced in dollars? 

The other issue that comes up is who the dress is made for.

Perhaps ordinary Nigerians aren’t the target audience, but this particular dress costs more than some foreign designer outfits like Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel, and Versace.

Any outfit that cost more than $1,000 is undoubtedly high-end no matter your tax bracket, so even for wealthy non-Nigerians, this Plait dress is still a very expensive one.

This dress brings up the widely held belief that Nigerian designers are overpricing and overcharging their customers.

Yes, we need to take into consideration that they have overhead costs like rent, fabrics, dyes, tailors wages, and other miscellaneous, and we don't expect them to sell their designs for pennies or kobos in our context, but one can’t help but struggle to comprehend what would warrant such an exorbitant price.