Engage with the DRUM West African editions at Mbari Kola in Lagos. Founded in Johannesburg in 1951, DRUM Magazine was passed between households, offices and schools, and argued over in its letters pages and on the street. Its Nigerian edition followed the country from the last years of colonial rule into independence, and its covers and fashion pages recorded how women dressed, posed and presented themselves through that decade.
On display at Wole Soyinka Gallery at Mbari Kola, 10 issues of the DRUM’S Nigerian edition, published between 1959 and 1969, are reproduced at actual size. Read in sequence, the issues move from tailored Western outerwear to local prints and embroidered gowns. Dress was a space of self-articulation, registering economic fortune, political sovereignty and the negotiations women made within and against patriarchal structures.
Cover Stories puts people back into the DRUM archive: the women on these covers, the readers who wrote in, the Lagosians answering them today, and everyone who encounters it here, in real time.
In collaboration with ROUNDABOUT, MOWAA invited designer Abiola Olusola to treat a single feature in DRUM as the brief for a new garment. Displayed in the Wole Soyinka Gallery at Mbari Kola, alongside the showcase of DRUM publications, this garment takes "Miss Nigeria to Paris" as its starting point, a 1958 DRUM feature linking dress to aspiration, travel and international recognition.
