With SS27, Mowalola pushes partywear into provocative new territory, turning the runway into a seductive theatre of glamour and excess, where eroticism, provocation and performance collide. And fashion feels thrilling again.
Scenographic, provocative and surprising, Mowalola’s SS27 show at London Fashion Week plays with contrast from the very beginning. Founded by Anglo-Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi, the London-based brand surprised first and foremost with its setting: unexpectedly polished and restrained, almost at odds with the designer’s punk, raw aesthetic, long rooted in provocation, the body, gender and Nigerian culture.
The tone of the collection is established from the very first looks. Opening the show is a model wearing a red mesh top paired with a satin skirt in the same shade, cinched at the waist with a thin strip of snakeskin. The same look immediately reappears, first in light blue and then in beige, creating a chromatic sequence that introduces the collection’s visual vocabulary.
The looks seem to revolve around different party personas, glamorous and erotic, yet pushed to their extremes through Mowalola’s distinctive language. Sheer fabrics, transparencies and ultra-low-rise silhouettes alternate with dresses that reveal far more than they conceal, turning the body into an essential part of the look rather than something to be hidden beneath the clothes.
Glitter also dominates the runway, appearing in virtually every form: across floor-length dresses, lingerie, menswear suits and oversized bomber jackets, the latter worn entirely on their own and transformed into mini dresses. It is a luminous, unapologetically glamorous succession of looks, in which the codes of partywear are exaggerated to the point of becoming almost performative.
The sparkling sequence is suddenly interrupted by a figure wrapped in a long black veil. The fabric completely envelops the model’s body, including her head and face, revealing only the faint outline of her silhouette through its subtle transparency. A red strip cuts across her torso, while she walks down the runway shielding her breasts with her arms. Darker than everything that came before it, the look creates a striking visual rupture within the sequence of the show.
Yet it is not the clothes alone that make the show so theatrical. A genuine play of glances unfolds between the models as they watch one another, cross paths and seem to react to each other’s presence. Even their walk gradually abandons the neutrality of the traditional catwalk, taking on an intensely performative attitude.
It is precisely this performative dimension that turns Mowalola’s SS27 into something beyond a simple succession of looks. Rather than watching a fashion show, it feels as though we are witnessing a theatrical performance, populated by different characters inhabiting the same nocturnal, erotic and provocative universe. A party staged on the runway, where glamour and excess coexist with darker, more unsettling moments, while the body remains, once again, one of Mowalola’s most powerful means of expression.
Years ago, in an interview, Mowalola declared: “The only way to change things is to destroy everything and recreate the world from scratch.” Read today, those words feel almost like a manifesto for her creative vision. Collection after collection, the designer continues to challenge codes, identities and conventions. And that world she once spoke of rebuilding from scratch, Mowalola seems to have already begun creating.
Mowalola SS27 Images
