Two months before Kanyinsola Onalaja was due to make her London Fashion Week debut, the Nigerian designer lost more than a decade of her work.
Onalaja was working late at her studio in northwest London when her brother called to tell her the building was on fire. The fire continued for four days, destroying her studio, graduate work, past collections, bespoke commissions and wholesale orders.
For a designer whose label dates back to 2014, the loss meant watching years of work disappear in a matter of days.
Onalaja gave herself two days to mourn before signing a lease on a new studio and beginning again. As she reflected on what the experience meant for her work, an old memory appeared on her phone: a 2020 collection titled “Rising from the Ashes.”
The coincidence became the starting point for her Spring/Summer 2027 collection.
Onalaja returned to the foundations of her label, drawing on the artisanal fabric painting, dyeing and embellishment she learned through her Yoruba and Edo roots. She then channelled the experience of the fire into a phoenix-inspired collection, moving through imagery of flames, ash, darkness, hope and renewal.
The result is a collection shaped as much by what was lost as by what came next.
Onalaja describes the collection as one of resilience and joy, but the story behind it is also about starting over. After losing work accumulated over a decade, she found herself reconsidering what her brand stood for and what she wanted its next chapter to look like.
That next chapter also continues her focus on women who have often been left out of luxury fashion.
Onalaja says her mission is to create pieces for women that luxury fashion has “forgotten”. Drawing from her own experience of significant changes in body size, she has built inclusivity into the label, with her garments available in sizes XXS to XXXXL.
Her craft-focused, maximalist designs have also attracted an international audience. Her pieces have been worn by artists including Tems, Olivia Dean and Ciara, while LeToya Luckett wore her hand-printed mesh Zusi dress to the 2022 BET Awards after the design caught the attention of her stylist.
Now, Onalaja is bringing that journey to London Fashion Week.
Her debut comes after years of building a Nigerian-rooted fashion label in London, but also after an unexpected moment forced her to start again.
The fire destroyed much of what she had already created. In its place, Onalaja built a collection about what can emerge after loss.
“As humans, we think, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Well the worst has happened and it was OK,” she said. “It’s a clean slate for me.”
For Onalaja, the London Fashion Week debut is therefore more than another milestone in her career.
It is the first major chapter of a story she had to rebuild from the beginning.
