Tall and willowy, Adejoke Taiwo speaks with a self-assurance and ease that belies her 26 years of age.
Perhaps some of that poise can be credited to the six years she spent in post-secondary school, including two years at Red Deer College studying costume cutting and construction and another four years at Ryerson University earning a degree in fashion design.
Or that she's a veteran of a reality-TV show, Project Runway Canada.
Or that she already has a clothing line to her name called alala, a word in the Yoruba language meaning "dreamer."
And dreamt Taiwo has, setting her sights on a career in fashion design ever since she was a child.
"If that didn't work out, I wanted to be a biologist," Taiwo laughs. "But it seems to be working out so far," she adds.
Taiwo produces a small binder which opens to a title page with Sewing Book neatly stencilled on it. Inside are notes on stitching-related matters, along with some rather crooked sewing samples -- the fruits of her childhood lessons that started when she was six-years old.
For Taiwo, sewing was anything but a chore. "When my parents wanted to punish me, they would threaten to take away my sewing machine," she says.
Taiwo's parents were born in Nigeria, but met in Canada. While both are university-educated with professional careers, Taiwo says they didn't have much extra money when she was a child, a situation that fuelled her creativity early on. "We'd get, like, one toy a year. I would cut up my dolls' clothes, so I could make new outfits for them," Taiwo recalls.
Taiwo's parents were among the founders of the Nigerian Canadian Association of Calgary. "We grew up with lots of our culture around us. We knew what it was to be Nigerian," she says.
For Taiwo, part of that early cultural education involved developing a love of traditional Nigerian fabrics, something that is one of the underpinnings of the alala line, which she launched last year.
Her clothes incorporate those traditional fabrics into contemporary fashion design. The African touches can be as subtle as a colourful fabric belt dressing up a simple black tee, or they can be as elaborate as a jumpsuit entirely constructed from wildly-patterned Nigerian textiles.
She decided on the concept to set her clothing apart from the work of other designers and because of her love of African fabrics. "I thought it was kind of catchy," she says, pulling out a box filled with yards of colourful textiles peeking out from it that she bought in Nigeria.
Taiwo counts the late Alexander McQueen among her fashion idols. "He's one of the reasons I studied costume design," she says, a skill she has put to use for several theatre companies, including Theatre Calgary. Other designers who inspire her include African-American Tracy Reese and Marc Jacobs, whose clothes sometimes find their way into her wardrobe though, she says, her bank account is a self-limiting factor.
Her skills with the sewing machine and serger do, however, allow her to achieve runway looks without runway costs. "If I can make it, I won't buy it," she says, though she will splurge on designer denim, Fidelity and J Brand in particular.
Taiwo admits her stint on Project Runway Canada helped her get to where she is today, but she almost didn't meet the show's application deadline. In fact, she was in Toronto attending her convocation when she happened to see a poster seeking applicants. The deadline was a mere two days away. She flew back to Calgary, cobbled together her application, and sent it in via courier.
"They called me a week later and asked me all sorts of questions," remembers Taiwo, after which she travelled to Edmonton to meet with the show's producers, her portfolio in tow.
"They tried to make me cry, but I was already so beat up from school, nothing they could say would hurt my feelings," she recalls.
Her maturity and mettle showed through, and she made the cut, something which lead to a flurry of last-minute study, as she read her drafting and draping textbooks from cover-to-cover, watched every episode of the show's first season, and sketched each night in preparation for the challenges ahead, challenges that would involve making a gown out of post-it notes. She made it to episode nine before being cut.
"It was hard, but it was a cool experience, and I don't regret it," she says. "To gain that type of publicity on my own, it would have taken five or ten years. I wouldn't be sitting here today, with my own line, if it weren't for that show," she admits.
While Taiwo is not creating a Fall/Winter 2010 collection, because, she says, "it's no good to have a collection if you don't have the time to produce it, sell it, and market it properly," she'll be back for Spring/Summer 2011.
In the meantime, she's sewing into the wee hours of the morning on custom orders ranging from wedding dresses to party frocks. A company in Toronto has also hired her to design a maternity line.
Taiwo says she wants to remain in Calgary, but that it's hard to build a fashion industry here, because so many of her colleagues leave to move elsewhere.
"There's money in this town, and there's a lot of people out there who want things that nobody else has. There's a need for it (a fashion industry) here," she says.
You can buy Taiwo's clothes at Mealan on 4th Street or online at adejoke. com.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/life/Fashion+designer+basks+glow+Project+Runway/3566244/story.html#ixzz12X4Yb33m
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