Q&A with Bubu Ogisi: Iamisigo Founder and Zalando Visionary Award Winner 2025

For the forthcoming season, the winner of the Zalando Visionary Award 2025, IAMISIGO, will present their SS26 collection at Copenhagen Fashion Week on Wednesday, August 6th.

IAMISIGO is a slow design house preserving Africa’s intangible cultural heritage through handmade, contemporary wearable art. Each piece is crafted using ancestral techniques, upcycled materials, and circular design principles—a form of resistance, storytelling, and preservation. Copenhagen Fashion Week asked Bubu Ogisi, founder and creative director of IAMISIGO, a few questions in anticipation of her SS26 show.

Looking ahead to SS26, what can we anticipate from the collection? Could you share a glimpse into what you’re exploring this season—whether in terms of mood, materials, or broader ideas that are shaping the work?

SS26 is deeply rooted in spirituality and the metaphysical dimensions of life—particularly in relation to self-preservation and protection through materiality. It draws from ancestral pedagogies and technologies, reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens.

We’re exploring what happens when memory—both personal and collective—fragments. The collection brings together unbleached cotton, recycled materials, and unconventional fibres, woven through disrupted, layered techniques that echo the cryptic rhythms of our digital systems.

It’s a collection that exists in the in-between—a liminal space between what was, what is, and what’s yet to come. Mood-wise, it’s introspective and raw. It calls us to re-tune the mind, body, and soul; to remember not just through form, but through feeling.

This season, you’re the recipient of the Zalando Visionary Award—what does this acknowledgment mean to you personally and professionally?

Personally, this recognition affirms that work grounded in integrity, intuition, and cultural memory holds value far beyond trend cycles. Professionally, it opens up new rooms, new worlds, and new systems—spaces where we’re not just visible, but truly heard. It creates room to challenge existing structures and contribute alternative models of thinking, making, and being.

This isn’t just about fashion—it’s about decolonising space within the fashion ecosystem. The award invites deeper exchanges where knowledge, resources, and responsibility are shared in ways that nourish the mind, sustain the body of work, and honour the soul of the brand.

How would describe the Nigerian fashion ecosystem?

Culture and tradition remain the ever-present thread running through our process—anchoring everything we do. The beautiful chaos of Nigeria fuels our ability to transcend borders, allowing us to create unison through matter, movement, and meaning. Our conscious, nomadic, and experimental practices are a response to that rhythm.

At the core is care: care for ancient knowledge systems, care for the self, and care for the integrity of the work.

When you show in Copenhagen this season, what do you hope stays with the audience?

I feel deeply honoured and excited to present in Copenhagen this season. It’s more than a showcase—it’s a moment to share a living piece of my culture and heritage, translated through textiles, storytelling, and spirit.

This collection carries not just design, but memory—a language of its own woven into every thread. The show is an offering of sorts, a ritual performance that speaks not only to the eye, but to the body, the mind, and the soul.

My hope is that the audience leaves with more than a visual impression. That they feel the frequency of the work—that each piece resonates with intention, ancestral presence, and lived experience. If someone walks away feeling moved, seen, or subtly transformed, then the energy has done what it came here to do.

IAMISIGO has never been about spectacle. It has always been about finding the map to divine mystery systems.

Find out more about IAMISIGO.