‘Soil and Signal’ - A Review of ARA Designs at Green Access 2023

The ARA Designs collection that walked the runway at Green Access 2023 is the work of a designer who has made his decision about what fashion is for: not comfort, not accessibility, not the safe middle ground of "wearable art." It is an argument. It is the body as a site where contradictions do not cancel each other out but instead generate heat.

The collection opens with a look that is essentially a manifesto in textile form. A deconstructed tank, split down its identity between black jersey and gold-flecked knit, the two halves refusing to fully agree, sits over cropped cargo trousers that carry a dense, repeating graphic script along a trailing white panel. Green textured slides ground the feet.

The model does not so much walk as arrive, and the asymmetry of the top reads less like a design choice and more like a record of something interrupted. This is Lagos in fabric: layered, load-bearing, adaptive, wearing its contradictions the way the city wears traffic and tropics and ambition all at once.

What Akinyele is doing across this collection, and doing with increasing confidence, is refusing the binary between the ancestral and the synthetic. The marled green cardigan look makes this most tender.

Worn open at the chest, fraying deliberately at the hem, paired with all-over printed shorts carrying the same graphic script from the opening look and finished with a cream pointed cap that reads somewhere between ceremony and wandering, the look carries the weight of an elder and the restlessness of someone who left and came back changed. The unravelling hem is not an accident or an affectation.

Akinyele argues that craft and decay are not opposites, that what survives does so in a particular condition, worn at the edges, still standing. The dark leather slides keep the look from becoming a costume. It stays in the present tense.

The collection closes its argument, or rather, refuses to close it, with a long belted robe in that same chartreuse, layered over a mauve-grey silk dress that pools at the knee. The belt is tied, not buckled.

The mauve peeking from beneath the lime is unexpectedly tender, the way a softer register will sometimes surface inside a loud one if you wait long enough. Dark burgundy slides at the feet. The whole look has the quality of a man composed for something he is not entirely sure he is ready for. It is the most emotionally complex piece on the runway, and Akinyele lets it be that without explaining it.

Across all looks is a visual script that is dense, repeating, almost calligraphic and functions as the collection's recurring motif, appearing on shorts, on trouser panels, on printed fabric. It is tempting to read it as a language. Whether or not it is legible in any literal sense is beside the point. Its function is to insist that these garments carry text, that the body wearing them is not a blank surface but a page.

In the context of a designer working from Nigerian cultural materials and presenting at a platform like Green Access 2023, a show that has positioned itself as a runway for the next generation of African design voices, that insistence is not decorative. It is a declaration.

What Akinyele has built here is a collection that knows where it is from and is not nostalgic about it. The craft references are present but not precious. The silhouettes are contemporary without performing cosmopolitanism.

The colour language, earth greens, acid lime, mauve, gold-flecked black, suggests a palette pulled from soil and circuitry simultaneously, which is perhaps the most honest description of what it means to make fashion in Lagos right now. Green Access 2023 gave him a runway. He used it to make a statement that extends well beyond it.

‘Soil and Signal’ is exactly that: a collection rooted in one place and broadcasting outward, loud enough to be heard.