Sharon Omowayeola is teaching a generation to see clothing differently. Through her brand Shaykara, her sustainability workshops, and her collaboration with Sustainable Fashion Week UK, the Lagos-London designer is building an education-led case for slow fashion from the ground up.
By Isha Gaye
Editor in Chief, Afrique Noire Magazine
There is a photograph at the centre of Sharon Omowayeola’s work that tells you almost everything you need to know about the designer behind Shaykara: a model in one of her pieces, luminous against a pile of discarded textiles. Sharon does not have to explain the framing, because she trusts the image to do that work for her.
Fashion is one of the most polluting industries on the planet, and the African continent has spent decades absorbing the consequences of Western overconsumption. Sharon, a Nigerian designer based in London and the founder of Shaykarabrand, belongs to a generation of African creatives who are reading those consequences carefully and choosing to work the other way. Her practice sits at a particular intersection where she operates as designer, educator, workshop facilitator, documentary filmmaker, and researcher all at once, and while the clothes are the most visible part of what she does, they are not, in the end, the most important.
Sustainability as a foundation
Sharon’s commitment to sustainable practice predates the brand itself. It is the soil Shaykara grew out of rather than a value bolted on after the fact. Long before she was sourcing deadstock cotton or coconut shells reclaimed from food waste, she had been thinking carefully about what fashion takes from the planet and from the communities that produce it. The brand was born during a visit to the Lomé Grand Market in Togo, where she stood inside the colour and craft of West African textile and decided to build something that honoured both the maker and the material, and that decision shaped every choice that followed: Shaykara would source responsibly, pay artisans fairly, and refuse the throwaway logic that defines so much of modern fashion.
Today, the brand sources deadstock fabrics, pre-consumer offcuts, and post-consumer textile waste, working alongside Yoruba artisans for the handwoven Aso-Oke and hand-dyed Adire that anchor her collections. The garments are designed to live in a closet for years rather than weeks, and even the embellishments are deliberate, drawing on coconut shells salvaged from food waste, cowries that reference centuries of West African coastal trade, and beadwork applied by hand. Every choice is a small refusal to participate in the disposable economy, and every one of them points in the same direction.
“What’s next for me is deeper impact. Education, community-led programmes, and social responsibility.”