Guardian · 9 hours ago

From the Streets of Lagos to the Chanel catwalk: How a creative’s thrift-shop Style Took Her to Paris | Global...

Rachel Ojuromi didn't wait for the right resources, the right setting, or the right moment - she found them in Yaba market, in Lagos traffic, in a stranger who walked off and returned with her son to appear in a shot. That instinct for meeting the world as it actually is, rather than as it ought to be, carried the 22-year-old Nigerian from street corners in Gbagada to the Chanel catwalk at the Grand Palais. "One of my mantras is to live within the reality of your situation," she says - a philosophy that turns out to be not a constraint but a creative force. Her platform, Process Africa, extends that same ethic outward, insisting that the work of young African artists needs no qualifying prefix: "It is fashion. It is art. It is music. It is creativity." What Ojuromi's story quietly demonstrates is that originality doesn't come from access to the extraordinary - it comes from paying close enough attention to the ordinary that it becomes unrepeatable.