Mowalola's "Dirty Pop" Reimagines Y2K and Dystopia in Bold SS25 Collection
Mowalola Ogunlesi’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection, titled Dirty Pop, at London Fashion Week was a effective statement, mixing dystopian imagery with early 2000s pop culture. Dirty Pop became marked via ambitious colorations, sensual cuts, and daring, futuristic designs that challenged societal expectations and embraced the allure of pop culture icons. The collection additionally driven the bounds of gender, a ordinary subject matter in Mowalola's paintings, highlighting her willpower to breaking faraway from conventional fashion tropes.
By Asteroid Media
The proposal in the back of Dirty Pop came from the Y2K aesthetic, a nostalgia for the early net age and pop music, blended with Ogunlesi’s ongoing exploration of a dystopian future. She infused this collection with elements of a laugh and playfulness, presenting a mixture of father iconography, image prints, and hanging substances like leather-based, which has come to be a signature element of her design aesthetic. Leather jackets, mini skirts, and tops with exaggerated, almost surreal, shapes made appearances at the runway, giving the collection a rebellious, nearly punk-like edge. The boldness of those designs speaks to Mowalola’s desire to apply fashion as a vehicle for commentary on current society.
As a designer, Ogunlesi often attracts from her personal heritage, blending Nigerian and Western influences to create a fashion this is deeply rooted in each cultures. Her upbringing in Nigeria and exposure to Western media, specially MTV, fashioned her expertise of favor and its strength to initiate concept and speak. In Dirty Pop, she revisited the early 2000s with an almost satirical lens, portraying popular culture’s glamour alongside its extra dystopian factors. The show performed with contrasts—flamboyant, pop-stimulated appears were combined with darker, extra competitive issues of societal collapse and hyper-commercialism.
Mowalola’s paintings has usually been approximately hard norms, and Dirty Pop became no exception. The collection took at the idea of appropriation and ownership in pop culture, something she has explored in previous collections like Darkweb AW23, which critiqued company control over modern society. In Dirty Pop, this observation became extra playful, with nods to superstar subculture and the ever-present impact of capitalism on our perceptions of fame, splendor, and success. The use of colourful, almost cartoonish designs spoke to the superficiality of those ideals, at the same time as the incorporation of darker, dystopian elements hinted at their underlying effects.
Ultimately, Dirty Pop become a celebration of freedom—freedom from gender norms, societal expectations, and the conventional fashion calendar. Mowalola has often stated that she doesn’t abide by enterprise constraints, preferring to comply with her very own direction. This defiance become glaring in her SS25 show, which felt like a announcement of individuality and rebellion. Each piece within the collection turned into designed to initiate notion, spark communique, and undertaking the target market to reconsider their ideas of what fashion may be.
By presenting a set that become right now nostalgic and forward-searching, Ogunlesi reasserted her position as one of the maximum interesting and unpredictable designers in fashion nowadays. With Dirty Pop, she invited her audience into a international wherein pop culture, rebel, and dystopian futures collide, creating a completely unique visual narrative that both captivates and challenges the viewer.
