The Global Rise of Ankara: How West African Fabric Is Driving Fashion Tourism from Lagos to London

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Ankara never started in Africa. It began as a Dutch attempt to mass-produce Indonesian batik, and it failed in the market it was built for before it found the one that made it famous. Dutch manufacturers tried to replicate hand-waxed Javanese cloth by machine in the nineteenth century, but the process left cracks and colour bleeds that Indonesian buyers rejected as inferior copies of the real thing.

According to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection records, that rejected cloth found an unplanned market among West African soldiers recruited from the Dutch Gold Coast into the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia between 1831 and 1872, who carried the fabric home and started a trade that outgrew its origin story entirely.

By the 1890s, factories in Britain and the Netherlands were designing wax prints specifically for West African taste, adjusting colour and pattern to feedback from traders on the coast. The company that came to dominate that trade, Vlisco, was founded in Helmond in 1846 and still manufactures in the Netherlands today.

That reversal, a colonial product redesigned by the people who bought it is the detail any writer covering Ankara has to get right, because it is also why the fabric now moves in the opposite direction: out of Lagos ateliers and onto London runways, pulling travellers along behind it.

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Lagos and London are now running parallel Ankara-driven fashion calendars, Lagos Fashion Week each October and Africa Fashion Week London each August, which means the fabric has stopped being a diaspora souvenir and become a travel circuit with its own dates, designers and paying audience. The question that matters is not whether Ankara fashion tourism exists. It is whether London’s fashion institutions will keep treating it as a guest slot or start building the buyer contracts and manufacturing partnerships that would make it a fixture rather than a season.

The RCA Argument 

Who Carried the Cloth, and Why It Mattered

The soldiers who brought batik-style cloth back from Indonesia were not the ones who turned it into a West African institution. That work fell to market women, the cloth traders of Lomé, Accra and Lagos who built commercial networks around wax print through the twentieth century, choosing patterns, naming them, and deciding which designs reached which customers. In Nigeria, the fabric became bound up with Yoruba asoebi culture: the practice of matching cloth worn by guests at weddings, funerals and naming ceremonies to signal unity and belonging.

This is documented trade history rather than folklore. The V&A itself describes Ankara’s story as one “rooted in trade monopolisation and cultural appropriation, yet acting as a conduit for African agency and resistance.”

What it means today is that Ankara carries two kinds of value at once: the commercial value tracked by fashion economists and the social value that turned a rejected Dutch export into a marker of Nigerian identity long before any tourism board thought to package it. Lisa Folawiyo, the Lagos-based designer whose 2021 Ankara gown entered the V&A’s permanent collection under accession number T.46:1-2022, is one of the clearest examples of that shift from craft to institution: her work moved from Lagos wardrobes into a London museum’s holdings within a single career.

Nigeria was not the only country where this happened. In Togo, a generation of women traders known as the Nana Benz, named for the Mercedes-Benz cars their wealth afforded them, controlled wax print distribution out of Lomé’s Grand Marché from the 1950s into the 1980s, at one point accounting for a large share of Togo’s informal commercial economy. They secured exclusive rights to specific patterns from Vlisco and other Dutch manufacturers, named the designs, and decided which traders in Accra, Lagos or Cotonou could sell them, turning fabric distribution into a genuine seat of economic and political power for women in a period when few other routes to that power existed.

This is why any RCA account of Ankara has to widen its lens past Lagos alone. The fabric’s fashion tourism circuit runs through Nigeria today because Nigeria currently has the strongest designer pipeline and the largest diaspora audience in the UK, but the trade infrastructure that made Ankara a pan-West African language was built across Togo, Ghana and Nigeria together, by women whose names rarely appear in fashion-week press releases.

Lagos Fashion Week and the Business Behind the Runway

Lagos Fashion Week, founded by Omoyemi Akerele in 2011, is the clearest evidence that West African fashion built its own infrastructure rather than waiting for one to arrive from outside. The event now hosts more than sixty African designers across four days each October, run under a mandate its organisers tie explicitly to job creation and gender equality.

Nigeria’s wider fashion industry was valued at approximately $4.7 billion in 2025, or around 15 per cent of the $31 billion Sub-Saharan African fashion market, according to Euromonitor data reported by Nairametrics.

That figure sits inside a larger continental picture. UNESCO’s first report on African fashion, launched at Lagos Fashion Week in October 2023, found that the continent exports $15.5 billion in textiles annually and hosts thirty-two fashion weeks a year, from Casablanca to Nairobi. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay framed the sector as a channel for cultural diversity that also builds economic standing for young people and women.

How Ankara Fashion Tourism Reached Space House, London

London’s side of the circuit runs through Africa Fashion Week London, founded and directed by Queen Ronke Ademiluyi-Ogunwusi. The event marked its fifteenth season on 9 and 10 August 2025 at Space House in central London, and has presented close to three thousand African and African-heritage designers over its history.

The 2025 edition partnered with the British Council to showcase Nigerian labels Henri Uduku and Black Fine and Fly, routing them through business clinics and manufacturing-hub tours with UK fashion academics rather than a single catwalk appearance. Ademiluyi-Ogunwusi described the partnership as a step toward building cross-cultural connections within the global fashion industry, not a one-off showcase.

London’s institutional interest in Ankara predates the current fashion-week circuit. The V&A’s Africa Fashion exhibition ran from 2 July 2022 to 16 April 2023, displaying more than 250 objects from 45 designers across more than 20 countries, the largest exhibition of African fashion the UK had staged. Curator Christine Checinska said the show was built to widen the stories fashion could tell about the continent, and to leave visitors questioning assumptions they had walked in with.

What Still Has to Change

None of this means the relationship between Lagos and London is balanced. Ankara’s own history is a warning about who profits from West African taste: the highest grade of wax print sold across the continent is still produced by a Dutch company nearly two centuries after the trade began, even as African designers and traders built the cultural meaning that gives the cloth its value.

A fashion tourism circuit that routes attention and spending through London without routing manufacturing contracts and ownership back through Lagos would simply repeat that pattern in new clothing, glamorous on the runway, extractive underneath it.

The next stage of Ankara fashion tourism will be decided by whether partnerships like the British Council’s turn into standing buyer relationships and manufacturing investment, or whether they remain a showcase that resets every August. Lagos has already built its own calendar, its own designers and its own reported billions. London’s fashion institutions now have to decide whether they are hosting West Africa’s fashion industry, or still just borrowing its cloth.

That decision will not be made in a single season, and it will not be made by museums or fashion weeks alone. It will show up in smaller signals: whether the designers who show at Space House get stocked by London retailers the following spring, whether British fashion schools send students to Lagos ateliers rather than only inviting Nigerian designers to visit, and whether the next V&A-scale exhibition credits the traders and tailors who built the fabric’s meaning as clearly as it credits the manufacturer that printed it. Readers planning a trip around either fashion week now have a genuine choice to make about which side of that story they want to watch unfold.

West Africa’s fashion economy is one thread in a much wider story about who tells Africa’s cultural narrative and who profits from it. Read more of Rex Clarke Adventures’ coverage of African creative industries, heritage economies and the travel circuits building around them. If this piece told you something about Ankara you did not know, the rest of “Africa, In Full” has more of the same: specific, sourced, and never written by a tourism board.

Frequently Asked Qu,estions (FAQs) And Answers 

Is Ankara fabric actually African?

Not originally. Ankara descends from Dutch attempts to machine-copy Indonesian batik in the nineteenth century. Indonesian buyers rejected the imitation, and Dutch traders found a lasting market for it in West Africa instead, where local traders and designers reshaped it into the fabric now associated with the region. (Source: V&A, collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O266516)

What is the difference between Lagos Fashion Week and Africa Fashion Week London?

Lagos Fashion Week, founded in 2011 by Omoyemi Akerele, is held each October in Lagos and is aimed primarily at industry buyers, press and Nigerian designers. Africa Fashion Week London, founded by Queen Ronke Ademiluyi-Ogunwusi, runs each August in London and is aimed more broadly at the public, diaspora communities and international designers of African heritage.

Why is London significant to West African fashion tourism?

London holds one of the largest Nigerian-born populations outside Nigeria, 270,768 recorded in the 2021 Census for England and Wales alone — plus institutions like the V&A that have collected and exhibited West African fashion. That combination of resident audience and institutional interest supports a recurring fashion calendar rather than one-off events.

How big is Nigeria’s fashion industry?

Nigeria’s fashion industry was valued at approximately $4.7 billion in 2025, according to Euromonitor data reported by Nairametrics, representing about 15 per cent of the wider $31 billion Sub-Saharan African fashion market.

Who makes the highest-grade Ankara fabric today?

Vlisco, a Dutch company founded in 1846, remains the dominant producer of premium wax print, alongside African-based subsidiaries such as Woodin and GTP. Most of the cultural meaning and design demand behind the fabric, however, comes from West African traders, tailors and designers rather than the manufacturer itself.