Guinness is having a moment right now. Sales increased by 19 per cent across Europe last year and a YouGov survey recently crowned it the UK’s most recognised and popular beer brand. You see it everywhere: Kim Kardashian was spotted sipping a pint on her trip to London earlier this year, and GQ penned an article in May questioning: “How everyone made drinking Guinness their personality.”
There are Instagram accounts dedicated to well poured (and not-so-well-poured, see: @shitlondonguinness) pints of Guinness in the capital, and brandishing retro Guinness merch — think toucans and the “Guinness is good for you” slogan — has suddenly become a trendy young Londoner’s staple.
But this isn’t the inspiration behind Labrum London’s latest collaboration with the beer brand, which was designed by Labrum’s founder, Foday Dumbuya. Unaware of Guinness’ sudden new stylishness, Dumbuya instead focused on his authentic memories of the drink, back from his upbringing in Sierra Leone.
“It was inspired by my nan and all the older people I’d see drinking Guinness while I was growing up in Sierra Leone,” he says. “My nan used to drink it before going to bed and she’d give us this story about how Guinness has a lot of iron and how it makes you stronger - you grow up hearing that.” (This is also what inspired the “Guinness is good for you” tagline, though it is still alcohol, so the brand eventually had to abandon this marketing technique.)
The collection was also inspired by Guinness’ constant tableside presence in Sierra Leone, especially when a group is engaged in a dedicated game of draughts (aka checkers). Labrum’s exclusive new print, designed for the collection, depicts these moments in delicate line drawings, printed onto bucket hats, t-shirts and Labrum’s trademark safari shirts.
Dumbuya moved to the UK from Sierra Leone via Cyprus when he was 11, and he still doesn’t think people in England realise just how much of a culture of Guinness-drinking there is in Africa, despite three out of the five Guinness-owned breweries being located in Africa (roughly 40 percent of worldwide total Guinness volume is brewed and sold in Africa). “I don’t think people associate it with Africa,” he says. “They just look at it as wholly Irish. They don’t realise how long it’s been over in Africa for and how intertwined with the culture it is.”
Dumbuya was recently named as the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British design, presented to him by King Charles. “I cried for a couple of days,” he says. “It was surreal — what I’m doing, it wasn’t set up to win awards, it was set up to send a message, to educate people about the fact that African history is global history. So getting awarded [the Queen Elizabeth II Award] was such a shock.”
Labrum, which proudly displays the tagline “Designed by an immigrant” on each item of its clothing, is also a project designed to inspire young people from circumstances similar to Foday’s. “Other people that look like me, or who were born or grew up in Sierra Leone, can say ‘Okay, he’s done it, now we can do it.’”
Inspiration is key — you cannot be what you can’t see, but in the meantime, it’s a stylish game of draughts and a half pint of Guinness for us.
