Nigerian Photographer Reimagines ’70s Yoruba Fashion

An image from Oye Diran's A Ti De series. Credit: Oye Diran.

The Nigerian photographer Oye Diran has brought back ’70s Yoruba fashion in a new series for culture magazine Nataal. Titled “A Ti De,” Yoruba for “We Have Arrived,” the series is a celebration of vintage iro and buba styles as well as hair. The idea came to him when an aunt sent him a photo that demonstrated the high style of Yoruba women in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. When he searched online and couldn’t find more, he then recreated them.

“Yoruba fashion has evolved in different ways over the last few decades but has always maintained its authentic look,” Diran told the BBC. “I feel we started seeing more of its modernisation from the 2000s up until today. For example, in the 1960s the length of the iro ended right above the knees. Today the length of the iro can go as far as the feet. We see influences from other fashion trends around the world on Yoruba fashion,” he said.

The series comes with a video featuring the three models, set to Kizz Daniel’s song “Eko.”

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See the series HERE.

Otosirieze Obi-Young

Otosirieze Obi-Young is a Nigerian writer, editor, journalist, and curator. As Editor of Folio Nigeria, he profiles innovators and facilitators in culture: business, art, photography, music, activism, health, food. He has extensive experience working in the African literary scene. He is currently the chair of judges for The Gerald Kraak Prize, for African storytellers exploring social justice, sexuality, and gender, and he was a judge for The Morland Scholarship. He was an editor at 14, Nigeria's first queer art collective, and Curator at The Art Naija Series, a sequence of e-anthologies exploring different aspects of Nigerianness. From late 2016 to early 2020, he led the transformation of the literary blog Brittle Paper to a standard platform, creating and administering The Brittle Paper Awards, the first by an African publication. His work in queer visibility advocacy has been profiled in Literary Hub. In 2019, he won the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. In 2020, he was named among "The 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians" by Avance Media. He completed a collection of short stories in 2016 and his novel in 2020. He has an MA in African studies from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. From 2017 to 2018, he taught English at Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu. Find him on otosirieze.com or on Twitter & Insta: @otosirieze.

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