At a small fashion studio in Lagos, the designers and tailors are busy cutting clean lines through the swathes of fabric. “Cotton T-shirts were the first item we produced,” says designer Oroma Cookey-Gam, co-founder of This is Us, which makes contemporary Nigerian designs, from oversized shirts to jumpsuits and kaftans, using locally produced cotton.
To source the cotton, Cookey-Gam makes a monthly trip to Funtua textile mill, a factory in Katsina in the north, which is one of the few mills fully operational in the country. She then makes the three-hour journey to the Kofar Mata dye pit in Kano, the oldest pit in Nigeria, where the cloth is hand-dyed for up to eight hours into shades of indigo.
