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Growing up in Chichester, a small city in the south of England, the fashion designer Olivia Ozi-Oiza Chance often heard talk of this or that “English rose.” The term — used to describe a pale-skinned, pink-cheeked female beauty — unsettled Chance, who has a British father and a Nigerian mother. “It made me question: ‘Am I beautiful? Am I desirable?’” she says.
This week, the designer’s namesake brand, Oiza, returned to London Fashion Week with a collection that’s both a re-examination and a repudiation of the English rose. The clothes may be romantic: a cotton lace vest with a row of baroque pearls, a gathered duchess satin skirt with cutouts. But, like all of Chance’s work, they were partly conceived to subvert longstanding aesthetic ideals. “Britain is becoming more and more diverse,” says Chance, who was one of five designers selected this year by the British Fashion Council DiscoveryLAB program, which highlights the work of rising talents, “and beauty standards need to be changed to reflect society.”
For research, she looked to archetypal English gardens, but also beyond them. One of her main inspirations was the artist Harold Gilman’s circa 1905 “Portrait of a Black Gardener,” thought to be the first full-length British painting of a sub-Saharan African person without other subjects. Chance pays tribute to this gardener — who wears a white button-up, taupe slacks and a pensive expression — with one of the collection’s genderless pieces, a cream-colored jacquard button-up that’s styled in the lookbook with high-waisted floral brocade cargo pants. Other elevated takes on workwear include a pair of straight-leg overalls in supple brown suede and a black apronlike dress with a delicate lace band across the front. References to Chance’s Nigerian side also abound: A stone-colored crocheted cardigan with a scalloped edge that calls to mind the garment of an Englishwoman tending her garden is adorned with cowrie shells (once used as currency in West Africa), and a beige crochet halter-neck dress has been hitched above and below the hips in a nod to the wrap skirts Nigerian women wear to tend theirs.
These pieces are the fullest expression to date of a vision Chance, 31, has been developing for most of her life. “I was very immersed in my two cultures from early on,” she says. “We had African sculptures and my mom would cook Nigerian food a lot.” It was Chance’s mother, a model turned skin-care entrepreneur, who’d wear a gele (head wrap) and other staples of traditional Nigerian dress to church, who sparked Chance’s interest in fashion, even if, like most children, the designer wanted to fit in with her friends and usually dressed accordingly.
In time, Chance came to embrace her dual heritage more fully, and by 2012, when she began studying design at Middlesex University in London, it felt less like something to be navigated and more like fertile creative ground. Her final school collection, Sunday Best, referenced Victorian England, ceremonial masks worn by the Bamiléké people of Cameroon and various pockets of the African diaspora. It also cemented lace as a primary material for her: She likes its varied texture, and that it enables her to channel African fashions by making things graphic and geometric, but in her own way — by relying on the material itself rather than on color and print. She sources the fabric from U.K.-based African vendors whenever possible.
In 2018, following stints at brands including Martine Rose and Burberry, and while still a designer at the British fashion retailer AllSaints, Chance created a small collection of clothes — hand-stitching lace panels and trims in her off hours — and photographed them at Riyom Rock, a striking assemblage of stones south of Jos, Nigeria. Around the same time, she documented residents of London’s Peckham area, which is known as Little Lagos, with the goal of creating the kind of archive of contemporary, high-end Nigerian style that she’d been unable to find in her school days. Along with the diversity and antiracism initiative she spearheaded at her industry job, these projects gave her renewed confidence that, as she puts it, “yeah, I have something to say.” She launched Oiza in 2022.
The brand’s first presentation, a cross-cultural exploration of wedding and funeral garb, took place in a London church this past February. But the line garnered attention even before that: Chance would wear pieces to fashion events and last year wore several during her own wedding weekend in Tuscany. She chose a slim-fitting white lace dress accented with pearls and ostrich feathers for the welcome dinner and a cowrie shell-embellished bra for a pool party, emphasizing the extent to which the clothes are at once geared toward others — “I want them to be like pieces of art or collectibles that you have in your wardrobe forever,” she says — and deeply personal. As Chance says, “It’s me telling my story.”
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