What powers Lagos’s creative economy beyond Afrobeats—and Chanel?
What connects Afrobeats, Rachel Ojuromi’s Chanel debut and Detty December? Lagos’s creative economy spans music, fashion and art
Afrobeats travels far beyond Nigeria. Lagos’s creative economy and cultural life also shine on other stages: the runway, an international art fair and the concerts and homecomings of Detty December.
Now, the city is in the international spotlight: Chanel’s new creative director, Matthieu Blazy, invited Lagos-based creator Rachel Ojuromi to walk in the house’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Paris after her fashion videos caught his attention.
But Lagos was never waiting for an invitation. Nigeria’s former capital has long been a cultural powerhouse, home to a prolific film industry, generations of musical innovators, and a fashion scene with a distinct sense of identity. What is changing is the scale of its influence and the connections between its fields. The organisations behind Lagos Fashion Week, ART X Lagos, and Design Week Lagos are connecting local creatives with wider audiences and buyers, while creating opportunities that last beyond a single event.
Afrobeats and the Global Reach of Nigerian Music
The most obvious place to start is music. Afrobeats has become a defining sound of contemporary pop, with artists such as Wizkid, Burna Boy, Tems, Rema, and Ayra Starr reaching audiences far beyond Nigeria.
From international collaborations to sold-out arenas, Nigerian music has entered the global mainstream without abandoning the rhythms, languages, and references that make it distinctive.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
Rachel Ojuromi’s Chanel Debut Began on the Streets of Lagos
In fashion, a recent moment of international visibility came on October 5, when Lagos-based creator and model Rachel Ojuromi made her runway debut at Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2027 show in Paris.
Her journey began in Lagos: working with her friend, stylist and designer Debby Fasingha, Ojuromi made a video recreating looks from Chanel’s 2026 Métiers d’Art collection on the city’s streets. The video drew over two million views and captured the attention of Chanel creative director Matthieu Blazy, who invited her to walk in the show.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
What Defines Contemporary Nigerian Fashion Beyond the Prints?
Ojuromi’s debut also draws attention to Lagos’s wider fashion culture, where social-media creators sit alongside designers such as Lisa Folawiyo, Kenneth Ize, and Adebayo Oke-Lawal of Orange Culture. Their work has helped redefine what contemporary African design can look like. Traditional textiles coexist with experimental tailoring, gender-fluid silhouettes, and an aesthetic vocabulary that resists the expectation that African fashion must always feature colourful prints or recognisable heritage motifs.
African designers aren’t reinterpreting tradition for Western consumption. They’re developing their own interpretations of contemporary fashion, drawing from local culture by choice, rather than out of expectations from international markets.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
Lagos Fashion Week and ART X Lagos: Where Fashion, Art and Music Collide
These different creative worlds are anything but isolated. In autumn, Lagos becomes an especially fascinating place to observe this cultural exchange. Lagos Fashion Week brings together emerging designers, established labels, international buyers, and the city’s fashion community.
ART X Lagos, West Africa’s leading international art fair, attracts artists, collectors, and cultural professionals while expanding beyond conventional exhibitions. Its flagship platform, ART X Live!, brings together live music and visual art. The 2018 edition offers a revealing example: Nigerian musician and producer Odunsi The Engine was appointed creative director, infusing contemporary music into the international art fair experience. This seemingly simple crossover illustrates something fundamental about Lagos: creativity rarely respects the boundaries of individual industries.
Fashion and art draw from music; music shapes visual identities; art becomes a gathering place for communities whose interests extend well beyond gallery walls; and fashion gives those ideas another form of expression.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
What Is Detty December? Lagos’s Year-End Party Season
Then there’s Detty December, the festive season phenomenon that transforms Lagos into a destination for concerts, parties, cultural events, and diaspora homecomings. More than an extended holiday celebration, it illustrates how entertainment, tourism, fashion, and local businesses can come together as part of the same cultural economy.
Lagos is a city whose creative identity is built as much through social interactions and shared experiences as through the work of individual artists.
Who Founded Lagos Fashion Week, ART X Lagos and Design Week Lagos?
Cultural influence and a functioning creative industry are not necessarily the same thing. Lagos does a remarkable job of connecting the two.
When Omoyemi Akerele founded Lagos Fashion Week in 2011, her ambition extended beyond organising runway shows. Through initiatives such as Style House Files, she has helped designers develop commercial opportunities and navigate the realities of building sustainable fashion businesses.
A similar philosophy inspired Tokini Peterside-Schwebig to establish ART X Lagos in 2016. Instead of relying exclusively on international institutions to introduce African artists to global collectors, the fair brings those audiences directly to Lagos.
In 2019, Titi Ogufere launched Design Week Lagos, creating another platform that connects African design to international networks while addressing the relationship between creativity, manufacturing, and distribution.
These three initiatives involve different disciplines, but share the ambition of turning creative visibility into lasting opportunities. That ambition is far from guaranteed: across the global creative industry, cultural recognition does not always translate into economic independence for emerging economies.
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
Can Lagos Be a Global Creative Capital on Its Own Terms?
Lagos is not a creative utopia: infrastructure limitations, economic pressures, and uneven access to resources continue to affect its creative communities. Romanticising these challenges as part of the city’s charm would miss the point.
Lagos’s relevance lies in what people are building despite them. For the next generation of designers, musicians and creative entrepreneurs, the city offers an example of how local identities, international ambitions and cross-disciplinary collaboration can coexist without following a predetermined Western blueprint. In other words, it would be profoundly misguided to ask whether Lagos will become the next London, Paris or New York. Instead, we should all ask why we still assume that creativity’s future must follow any of those models.
Edoardo Passacantando
Author and Editor, Milano
