Get to know IAMISIGO designer Bubu Ogisi ahead of the brand’s anticipated CPHFW debut

To say that IAMISIGO brings a new point of view to this season’s Copenhagen Fashion Week schedule feels like an understatement. Based in Lagos, Nigera (as well as Nairobi, Kenya and Accra, Ghana) and drawing from traditional craft techniques and materials from its region, the brand offers up something wildly different than its peers on the brand lineup, both aesthetically and spiritually. But that isn’t to say that IAMISIGO is all narrative. Quite the contrary, the garments themselves feel impossibly contemporary, oft streamlined silhouettes rendered in gorgeously tactile materials. A marriage of past and future. No wonder the brand scooped the Zalando Visionary Award last season, which secured its slot on the spring/summer '26 show schedule.

Related: Iamisigo scoops Zalando Visionary Award 2025

“My love of clothes began with watching women around me turn dressing into ritual – my mother, my grandmother, the women in my community,” says IAMISIGO designer Bubu Ogisi. “Clothes weren’t just worn; they were carried like memory, like armour.” Growing up in Nigera, she became particularly enamoured with fabric and its ability to function as “both a veil and a signal”. Though she graduated from the Ecole Superieure des Art et technique de la Mode (ESMOD) in Paris before founding IAMISIGO in 2009, there is nothing traditional about her approach to her brand. “IAMISIGO isn’t fashion in the conventional sense – it’s energy architecture,” says Ogisi. “It’s dressing to remember and to re-tune.”

From IAMISIGO’s very first collection, its DNA began to take shape. While Ogisi describes her first designs as “raw and instinctive”, there was still the notion of bringing African tradition, craft and techniques to Western fashion. “I was deconstructing Western silhouettes, but infusing them with African spirit-memory and traditional forms,” says Ogisi. “You can still feel the original DNA in everything we do now: sculptural tension, metaphysical layering, a deliberate imperfection that speaks to the handmade.”

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Ogisi describes her practice as spiritual, rather than academic. She travels extensively, to Abomey, Kisumu, Kano, or along the Ghanaian coast, absorbing “technique and vibration”. “Lately, I’ve been focused on the metaphysical weight of materials – how fibres carry memory, how glass, metal and cotton can speak across time,” she says.

Throughout the process of arriving at her CPHFW debut, Ogisi describes Zalando as having a “rare kind of openness”. “ It didn’t feel extractive – it felt like alignment,” says Ogisi. Given that she has been developing IAMISIGO’s language and point of view for years now (she humbly says that she’s been operating beyond the fashion world spotlight, but her designs have been worn by the likes of Julia Fox and Naomi Campbell), receiving the award felt like “an affirmation of that work and a chance to expand it with care”. “They didn’t ask us to dilute; they asked us to deepen. That’s rare,” she says.

CPHFW, meanwhile, felt like a natural platform for IAMISIGO from the jump. Not only does the fashion week embody an unwavering commitment to sustainability – a point of view that squares with the IAMISIGO ethos – it also is known to foster and develop rising talent (just look at the NewTalent programme). “But what really moved me was the space for experimentation, for reimagining,” says Ogisi. “It’s not about fitting in, it’s about offering something other.  IAMISIGO doesn’t perform identity—we hold space for it. Copenhagen feels like a place where that space could be received and respected.”

That space has been held, quite literally, today at 10AM when the IAMISIGO spring/summer 2026 show is set to take place. We’ll be watching with rapt attention, eager to experience the vibrations ourselves.