Two months prior to her London Fashion Week debut, Kanyinsola Onalaja was working late in her NW10 studio. She texted her brother, asking if he could pick her up. He swung by, but instead of tooting his horn, he called her in a state of panic. The building was on fire. Beneath Onalaja’s studio, people were hammering on the door trying to get out. “We finally made it, but the fire took on a life of its own,” says the 33-year-old designer. It took four days for it to stop burning, by which time Onalaja had lost over a decade’s worth of work. “It was very scary and confusing. I’m still processing a lot of things.”
The Nigerian creative, whose mother had just shipped over her Istituto Marangoni graduate edit and every collection she’d made since, gave herself two days to mourn the bespoke commissions and wholesale orders that had also turned to ash. “If I stay in this slump, I’m going to stop designing,” she says of her show-must-go-on attitude. She signed the lease on a new studio and began reevaluating what her 2014-born brand stood for. A 2020 collection, called “Rising from the Ashes”, popped up as an iPhone memory. “It was crazy,” Onalaja says. “It summed up everything; things being bad, things being renewed.”
Onalaja went back to the founding principles of her label – to elevate the artisanal fabric painting, dyeing and embellishment she learned from her Yoruba and Edo roots into a maximalist dress lover’s dream – and funnelled them through the “narrative of a phoenix”. “You have the looks from the fire, then the ash greys, the stillness of black, the glimmers of hope and, finally, a bird of paradise in full bloom,” says Onalaja, who knew she was on the right track when she visited her show venue and the word “phoenix” was emblazoned on a screen. “I think even I’m going to be shocked when I see everything [that’s] exploding in my brain in the line-up together, but hopefully it will be a good shock.”
This is not a quiet collection. It is one of resilience and joy against the odds. Aside from being a celebrated embroiderer (she consulted for luxury brands like Mary Katrantzou, and interned for Christopher Kane and Giles Deacon before going it alone), Onalaja’s self-described “disco glam” dresses have cut through the noise (Tems, Olivia Dean and Ciara are all fans) because of the designer’s inclusivity. Kanyinsola herself has an auto-immune disorder that means her weight fluctuates. She has been a size 26, a size 12 and every size in between. “I like to say our mission is to create pieces for women that luxury often forgot.” The hope, she says, is that no other woman will struggle, like she did, to find a birthday dress, a wedding guest look, or “even something just a little bit fancy”. And so, her craft-focused garments – in all their beaded, tasselled, feathered glory – are available in sizes XXS to XXXXL. No other brand on the London Fashion Week spring/summer 2027 schedule can say the same. Less than a handful of brands show the same breadth of body diversity in terms of casting.
The Onalaja customer is too busy being fab – “she travels a lot, she’s very into the arts, she always has an event” – to worry about what the tag on her dress says. The brand took off after LeToya Luckett’s stylist came across Onalaja’s hand-printed mesh Zusi dress in a boutique in Atlanta and sent the Destiny’s Child star to the 2022 BET Awards in it. A member of The Real Housewives of Atlanta universe came across the personality-packed pieces in that same boutique, and Onalaja was set off on a new trajectory.
“It’s been a whirlwind of emotions… actually a whirlwind of just everything to be honest,” notes Onalaja, who says the fire gave her something unexpected: freedom. “As humans, we think, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Well the worst has happened and it was OK. I’m not scared anymore. It’s a clean slate for me, and I want to be a lot more rooted in London because, even though I’ve been here, I haven’t really been part of the fashion scene.”
