The Thread

Before VY-SHUN, there was thread.

My grandmother was named Seri. Olowu came later; the trade gave it to her. Owu is the thread itself, the raw cotton line every garment in the world begins as, and she sold it so well, for so long, that the name of the material attached itself to hers. She did not inherit it. She earned it, cone by cone, until the market stopped calling her Seri and called her the one of thread. She was a socialite; people knew her before they knew what she sold.

Not cloth, not finished things, but the fibre itself, weighed out by hand and passed to the people who turn it into something with a label on it. The world worships the garment and forgets the thread that made it possible. The coat gets the picture and the source gets nothing, and after a while you see this is not an accident but the design: the world keeps the surface and forgets where it came from.

I lost her a month after I went back to boarding school. The thread kept moving; it always does. That is the cruelty the whole work is about: the source goes, and the surface carries on, wearing what she sold and never once asking her name.

I am nineteen, from the south-west of Nigeria, the grandson of the woman the market called Olowu. So when it came time to make something of my own, I did not make clothes. I made the opposite of a garment: thirty objects a garment would be afraid of, out of the most status-heavy thing a person can hang on their body, built to do the one thing jewellery is never asked to do, which is tell the truth to the person wearing it.

They are chrome, and the metal is the argument before a word is spoken. Chrome holds no colour of its own; it borrows the colour of whatever stands in front of it, so that when you lift one to your face the thing looking back at you is your face. It is a mirror you have to pay for, and it does not soften what it shows.

Each piece begins from the same picture: a weed coming up through a slab of concrete. They pour the world over you early and tell you it has set. A weed does not argue with the verdict. It comes up through the place that was paved precisely so nothing would.

.NOT FASHION. One of each. Made once. Never again.

Concrete can't kill a weed.