Interview: meet Zalando Visionary Award 2025 winner, IAMISIGO

Eva Hilinski

20 Aug 2025
Fashion

Interview: meet Zalando Visionary Award 2025 winner, IAMISIGO

Zalando returned to Copenhagen Fashion Week for the third Zalando Visionary Award 2025, bringing along African brand IAMISIGO for its Copenhagen debut SS26 runway show, Dual Mandate.

Dual Mandate experiments with four dimensions: body, spirit, mind, and emotion, approaching the body as a bio-electric landscape where physical and spiritual memories intersect. True to the brand’s philosophy, this exploration comes in profound connection with ancestral African artisanship techniques. Informed by local cultures and traditions, IAMISIGO sources materials all across Africa.

The duality plays out in textures. Receptive, grounding fibres, cotton sourced from Uganda and Kenya, sisal from Tanzania, raffia and jute from Nigeria, keep energy within. Reflective materials, luminous metals and glass from Kenya, and plastics from Nigeria radiate it outward.

We sat down with Bubu Ogisi, the founder and creative mind behind IAMISIGO, after the show for insight into her work.

Finding the balance

“The underlying factor was deeply rooted within the works of our hands. How do we enhance our hands through this idea of us moving into a different realm now of dependency on machinery?” Ogisi explained. More so, the question is how to sustain the idea of craftsmanship over time, and to balance the artisanship with machinery, which is, after all, also a product of human hands. “It is always about creating things slowly from unfunctional materials, like the plastic we used, developing new things or new ideas, even with weaving the cotton and the copper we had in this collection”.

“I think true African luxury is embedded in time. Time becomes the material. The ritual that goes into making something through a long space of time, through deep intentional connectivity, allows for something to be highly valued. You can’t place something that has taken so many hands, so many people, and so much time to make as not a luxury. I mean, what is luxury if that isn’t luxury?” Read that last sentence again, please!

‘Not anti-capitalist, but we are who we are’

Regarding the craft as an absolute foundation means rejecting the economy of scale, but that is the basic mentality of Ogisi. If you ever need to make her laugh, here is a tip: when asked whether she felt pressure to create a more commercial collection, she laughs with sincere amusement.

“Never, never… but, we are not anti-capitalist, we are just who we are, we would rather be limited edition than anything else. I would rather have five pieces that we took so much time to make, made by five people in different parts of the world, than five hundred people. It is more sustainable.” Besides, working with limited editions allows IAMISIGO to cultivate a community invested and appreciative of what the brand stands for.

Lagos to Accra to Nairobi

The brand encompasses multiple African communities, mirroring Ogisi’s upbringing, living in different countries. “I guess that’s what propelled me to embark on the research and engage with different communities in these different spaces. It is more than Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi. It’s Dakar, it’s Lomé, it’s Grand Popo, Kampala, and more… It’s about seeing how people engage with different materials, even in different processes.

How does Ashoke in Nigeria relate to the Kikoi made in Kenya, the Kita made in Cote d’Ivoire or the Kente made in Ghana? These are all the same process of weaving made on different looms using different materials, too. So how can we now marry all these different processes and materials and create something also together within those four different spaces?”

Watch the documentary following Ogisi’s creative process ahead of the show, filmed across Nigeria, Kenya, and Copenhagen.

Applications for the Zalando Visionary Award 2026 are open now until the 3rd of October. Read more about the Zalando Visionary Award here.

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