Afrocentric, Afrochic
Fashion designer and aesthetic style powerhouse Duro Olowu transcultural vision to the new decade of inclusiveness
On the back of last year's inaugural Virgil Abloh fashion exhibition at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in the US, it seems only fitting that Olowu turns his curatorial cosmopolitan eye toward the Windy City this month. Drawing from Chicago's public and private art collections, Olowu's Seeing Chicago (which opens on Feb 29) reimagines the relationships between artists and objects across time, media and geography.
In his inimitable style, Olowu combines photographs, paintings, sculptures and films in dense, textural scenes that incorporate his own fashion work and the art of Chi-Town locals including Kerry James Marshall, Ed Paschke and Karl Wirsum, along with Jae Jarrell and Gerald Williams, members of the city's Africobra artists' collective.
Olowu has been called a "master of mixed-media dressing"－and this keen appetite for combining various aesthetics drives his increasing influence as a style maker. His 2014 "Afro Deco" collection epitomizes this approach; he was inspired by the 1920s artist and furniture designer Eyre de Lanux, as well as the color palette of his artist friend Chris Ofili's 2007 painting The Raising of Lazarus. The SS16 collection was inspired by Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil and the Montego Bay style of Caribbean women who migrated to England in the '50s.
