On a balmy evening in 2022, a group of Nigerian artists, singers, fashion designers, creatives and writers gathered inside a hut-like structure flanked on both sides by wooden tiered seats for the first edition of VVS Lagos. Not long after they were settled, the pathway between the tiered seats turned into many things throughout the course of the night. It was first a runway for a list of impressive but mostly emerging Nigerian fashion designers. Many of whom, like Kadiju and Hertunba have now become the newest faces of Nigeria’s unceasing ascent to the global stage. Later in the evening, there would be vibrant music performances, an appearance by Asake – then in the infancy of his career – Olamide, and even Don Jazzy.
To say the least, this edition of VVS Lagos – a multi-day experience created to bring different aspects of the Nigerian creative industry together across fashion, music, film, tech and design – was an eclectic and fascinating experience. Not quite like the formidable and institutional flair of Lagos Fashion Week, VVS is more communal, grounded, and clearly aimed at redefining how different parts of the Nigerian interact with one another.
As the night wound down on that first edition, just before the after party was set to begin on a rooftop looking out to a stunning view of the Atlantic Ocean, Ifeanyi Nwune, the convener of VVS Lagos and the founder of I.N Official, an upcycle, sustainability focused fashion brand which also showed on the runway, stepped out to give a speech.
His speech was brief. The gist of it being that VVS Lagos was set to redesign the way different parts of Nigeria’s creative industry interact with each other. Nwune is a lithe, fair skinned man, full of energy and an easy charm that made his vision easy to believe. And even if there weren’t believers that night, Nwune has since proven that his thesis correct; the Nigerian creative industry needs institutions that prioritize disruptive ways of gathering, creating, and sharing their works.
“Looking back to the beginning, the fashion ecosystem felt fragmented. There were fashion weeks and runway presentations, but these existed as isolated moments,” Nwune explains. “People gathered for a show, celebrated briefly, and then disappeared until the next event months later. There wasn’t a sustained sense of community or collaboration. What was missing was a real community. There wasn’t a space where everyone was continuously talking, planning, building, or creating together.”
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Five years after that first VVS call, I caught up with Nwune a few days after the 2026 edition wrapped up. Now in its fifth edition, VVS Lagos has been expanding its ambitions, shifting its interests into tech, film and more firmly into music. This year’s edition featured a sprawling array of programmes from talks that consider the pressing concerns plaguing the Nigerian fashion industry, to its renowned runway show, a pop-up experience, an art exhibition featuring artists such as Addie Mak and Shalewa Valentine, and perhaps most interestingly, a recorded album featuring Wizard Chan, SOLIS4EVER, Jeriq, Minz, Siraheem and others.
“We’re doing things we’ve always dreamed of doing,” Nwune tells me. “VVS has always been about community and innovation, and I think we’ve expressed that successfully again this year,”
As Nwune sees it, VVS’ impact on the industry is isn’t best quantified by attendance numbers but through the unseen but deeply felt shift in creative thinking.
“More people are beginning to move beyond traditional runway shows and instead create complete cultural experiences that merge disciplines, audiences and conversations,” he says.
This year’s edition of VVS Lagos – working under the theme of Afromodernism – took place in different parts of Lagos. The vibrant pop-up at the glass-walled Mikano Motors, the Future Labs art exhibition (a newly introduced vertical to VVS’ ever-expanding art and fashion programming making space for early-stage artists and designers) at Yenwa Gallery, a release party for the new album at Octo Lagos, Future Labs fashion exhibition at the British Council, amongst others.
“Planning the festival consumes months of work, endless meetings, phone calls, and relationship-building,” Nwune admits. Nigeria is notoriously unsupportive of most creative endeavors. With little to no funds or unstudied incentives that subsidize a broad range of creative practices, institutions like VVS Lagos often have to play the role of disruptors and industry architects all at once.
Bringing VVS Lagos to life each year also sometimes involves some of Nwune’s personal funds as well as his company’s resources.
“Everyone believes in it, but it’s still demanding. The mission remains worthwhile because VVS has become something larger than any one brand,” he says.
Like this year, each edition of VVS Lagos has always been guided by themes. These themes create a throughline for the thousands of guests who arrive to discover new brands, interact with new and interesting artists, and get a feel for where Nigeria’s creative culture is headed next.
These thematic frameworks largely reflect the questions shaping the creative industry at that particular moment. “As Creative Director, each year’s theme is based on the conversations I believe the ecosystem needs to be having,” Nwune says.
The earliest editions were relatively straightforward. The inaugural event centred on the Glory of African Fashion while later editions became more conceptually ambitious, exploring ideas like The Luxury of Authenticity and Collaboration. As the platform evolved, so did our intellectual focus.
One edition explored the relationship between technology, African art and design, asking how innovation could strengthen local creative industries instead of simply importing existing systems. Nigerian-built platforms like Bumpa are an example of the kind of local infrastructure creatives need, seeing technology not as an accessory to creativity but as one of its foundations.
Although VVS is often perceived as a fashion platform, he has always imagined it as something much broader. Fashion, art, music, film and technology are intended to exist in conversation with one another, forming an interconnected creative ecosystem rather than isolated disciplines. The ambition has always been to create a space where these worlds intersect, strengthening not only individual creatives but the wider industry they belong to.
The themes that shape each edition are never chosen arbitrarily. Instead, they emerge from what he describes as the “energy of the season”—an attempt to capture where African creativity is at a particular moment. Previous editions have reflected different stages of that evolution. One encouraged creatives to look inward, reconnecting with ancestral memory before imagining the future. It was rooted in the belief that meaningful innovation begins with understanding where you come from, especially as more African creatives draw from spiritual and cultural histories rather than purely aesthetic concerns.
This year’s theme, Afro-modernism, represented a different shift. For him, the term perfectly describes the current creative moment across the continent. Rather than simply reclaiming tradition or responding to Western narratives, African creatives are actively defining contemporary African aesthetics on their own terms. Interestingly, the phrase wasn’t developed through weeks of brainstorming. He stumbled upon it in an Instagram post and immediately recognised it as the language that captured everything VVS had already been trying to articulate.
Looking back, Nwune points to a great number of milestones. “One of our defining moments was an exhibition curated by Ken Nwadiogbu, bringing contemporary art into conversation with fashion in a way that hadn’t been widely explored within the scene. The audience reflected that ambition. Cultural figures, including Don Jazzy, Asake, M.I Abaga, and Olamide, attended, not simply to support fashion but to experience a broader creative dialogue. They weren’t just coming to watch music, “They were seeing art and fashion existing together in one space.”
The next ambition is even larger: “A dedicated investment fund that begins with fashion before expanding into other creative sectors, alongside plans to take the VVS model into cities such as Paris and across the Middle East. Together, these initiatives point toward a future where VVS is no longer simply a cultural event but an enduring piece of creative infrastructure for Africa.”
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