BROTHERSLAWEE IS REWRITING WHAT NIGERIAN HERITAGE CAN LOOK LIKE
Built by brothers Sanjo and Mayowa Lawal, BrothersLawee sits somewhere between fashion label, art project and family archive, transforming the fabrics, images and cultural references they grew up around into things you can wear, collect and live with.
By Asteroid Media
In Nigeria, fabric carries information.
Lace can tell you there is an occasion before anybody sends an invitation. Ankara can hold family memory. A fila can complete an identity. Certain colours, textures and patterns immediately call up weddings, birthdays, naming ceremonies, Sunday services and the glorious visual competition of an owambe.
BrothersLawee understands that language, then deliberately changes the sentence.
Founded in 2024 by brothers Sanjo and Mayowa Lawal, the Lagos-based creative label reworks familiar Nigerian textiles into contemporary pieces intended to exist far beyond ceremony. Traditional lace becomes shirts, trousers and jackets. Heritage moves away from the occasional outfit and into something younger, looser and easier to live in.
But calling BrothersLawee only a fashion brand misses half the story.
The platform also sells art prints by both brothers, bringing their individual visual practices into the same space as the clothes. What emerges is less of a conventional clothing store and more of a creative universe where photography, visual art, textiles and fashion continuously feed one another.
They Grew Up Inside The Fabric
For Sanjo and Mayowa, textiles were not discovered through fashion-school mood boards.
They were already at home.
Mayowa has spoken about growing up around a mother who sold Ankara, Aso Oke, lace and other native fabrics, surrounding the brothers with colour, pattern and texture long before either of them understood how deeply those things were shaping their creative instincts.
Their environment mattered just as much. Sanjo’s visual language was influenced by Ijebu culture and the spectacle of Ojude Oba, while Mayowa has referenced Lagos, family life and traditional celebrations among the influences shaping his eye.
BrothersLawee feels like those memories being processed by two people who grew up, became artists, and then returned to the materials that had always been around them.
The brothers arrived at fashion through different but overlapping visual practices.
Sanjo Lawal is known for highly saturated photography exploring African identity, memory, colour and symbolism. His images often feel almost painterly, with subjects placed inside meticulously constructed visual environments.
Mayowa works across photography, textiles and digital art, frequently exploring memory, identity and African visual culture through pattern and image-making.
Through BrothersLawee, those practices stop existing separately from the clothes.
The brand’s art prints allow collectors to encounter the brothers’ creative worlds beyond garments, while the garments themselves often feel like extensions of the same ideas. Colour, composition, pattern and cultural references move freely between a photograph hanging on a wall and a piece of clothing hanging beside it.
It creates an interesting proposition: you can wear the art, or you can live with it.
Heritage, Minus The Museum Glass
What makes BrothersLawee compelling is its refusal to treat Nigerian heritage as something fragile.
The clothes play.
Lace appears in silhouettes more commonly associated with contemporary streetwear. Traditional references sit beside reversible shirts, outerwear and experimental styling. Recent explorations have included the IBEJI reversible shirt and reinterpretations of the fila gobi, continuing the brothers’ interest in cultural objects that can evolve without losing their origin.
That same freedom exists in their visual work.
The brothers are not attempting to preserve Nigerian culture by freezing it. They are treating heritage as material: something that can be photographed differently, cut differently, styled differently and given another life.
The past becomes something to collaborate with.
The Image And The Clothes Speak To Each Other
Perhaps BrothersLawee’s strongest quality is how difficult it becomes to separate the brand from the imagery surrounding it.
Sanjo has incorporated BrothersLawee garments into his fine-art photography, producing works where clothing, bodies, pattern and environment become one composition. His photographic pieces connected to the project explore elegance, brotherhood, cultural memory and the relationship between both siblings.
Those works have travelled into international art spaces, adding another dimension to a label that could easily have stopped at clothing.
This crossover helps explain why selling prints feels so natural for BrothersLawee. Fashion is not being used simply as merchandise, and art is not being treated as decoration for the brand. Both are products of the same visual conversation.
A shirt can carry the culture.
So can a photograph.
Wearing Memory Forward
Contemporary African fashion is sometimes discussed as though becoming modern requires moving away from tradition.
BrothersLawee suggests something far more interesting.
Modernity can come from being comfortable enough with tradition to alter it.
Sanjo and Mayowa are not asking younger Nigerians to dress exactly like previous generations, nor are they asking people to appreciate African art from a respectful distance. They are bringing both into everyday life.
A lace jacket instead of ceremonial agbada.
A photograph on the wall.
A cultural reference without costume.
An artwork and a garment existing under the same roof.
That may be BrothersLawee’s most compelling idea.
Heritage does not have to sit quietly in a wardrobe or hang silently in a gallery. It can move between both, changing form without forgetting where it came from.