Wekafore | When message does matter

Fashion hasn’t just been fashion for a long time. In fact, it may never have been. So if you were born in Africa and have something important to say the world, a T-shirt can be as powerful as any other media. Wekaforé Jibril (@softblackboy) is the epitome of the new realities of fashion as an agent of social change, and as he himself said “You can say anything you want on a T-shirt”.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised among the fabrics and embroidery of his mother’s dressmaking workshop and street football matches, Jibril was forced to emigrate to Dubai after a fire ravaged his home. The racist experiences he lived there would begin to shape his political vision before he even emigrated back to Bilbao to study fashion design with the aim of following the footsteps of one of his major references, Cristóbal Balenciaga.

His brand, Wekafore (@wekafore), was born as a tribute to his grandfather’s name -a tailor in a small town in Nigeria- and is shown to the public for the first time as a collection of T-shirts that reflect W.J.’s vision in his designs, talking about the role of African culture in the world and the imaginary of Nigerian streetwear. Wekafore has evolved a lot since then, but its taste for giving its collections a marked political and artistic character has not changed.

Today, Wekafore has collections of womenswear and menswear that seek inspiration in the past to narrate the future, achieving an afro-retro in which the most classic and minimal cuts meet the aesthetics of the 80’s. The designer also enjoys exploring the limits of masculinity and femininity, mixing and decontextualizing them while portraying life in the city where he grew up.

Considering all this background, his latest collection, SS18, is the most personal and characterful work of the firm. In it, he portrays the new generations of African children born in Spain and the loss of their cultural identity and language, while reflecting on immigration and the creation of new cultural roots. Not bad for just T-shirts. Wekafore is fashion at the service of a message. Its creator talks to us about something concrete and tangible in each garment, which takes on more strength when we look at the whole collection.

Wekafore SS18 | Photo: Olga De La Iglesia

Every day we come across people on the street with messages printed on their T-shirts -like the questionable feminist slogans, or musical groups logos that the user has never heard-. That’s why, in a society where almost every idea on a T-shirt has been trivialised, Wekafore is more necessary than ever. Beacuse using a message for commercial purposes is not the same as using your ideas and your truth to become part of a commercial circuit.