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"There were so many times when I would pitch stories, and you know, Nigeria is a very conservative country—pretentious as well—so a lot of topics were off the table and considered taboo. I always thought that fashion could do more than look beautiful and elegant, I always felt like we could actually question society. We could push for more...
So I left and decided to go into PR because at that point I was like, you know what, I really can’t joyfully express what I feel without being called out...
We’re just saying that exclusionary narratives and singular narratives are not the way forward. We should broaden our minds and allow ourselves to understand other people’s stories, and appreciate that. But once we started getting the press, people started warming up. Particularly there was a publication that did a story on us, and it wasn’t the most pleasant story, but after the CNN story, they literally did another full piece where it was all praises and stuff, and I just could not understand why the sudden change in their point of view...
Initially, I always imagined that our readers were going to be only Nigerians, I didn’t think that we’d have readers from America, from the U.K., from South Africa, from Ghana and Brazil. Just knowing that our stories are globally appealing and that we have readers from all these other countries, it really goes a long way. We very much have Nigerian readers, 40 percent of our readers are Nigerian actually, and so I see that there’s a community. Sometimes, I’m here in Lagos, and I’ll go to dinner, or I’ll go to a party and people introduce me like, “Oh that’s Richard from A Nasty Boy.”"
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