From The Curator at BlackFM
There is a particular species of Englishman who believes that a man’s tailor tells you everything worth knowing about him; I have always suspected the same might be said of a Lagos singlet. Asake’s style evolution, as chronicled recently by The Native, offers something like proof of this theory: a decade’s worth of character study conducted not in interview transcripts but in the cut of a trouser and the arrangement of a loc. The magazine’s writer, Naomi Kuete, traces the arc with the patience of a tailor letting out a seam, and the result is less a fashion timeline than a portrait of a man discovering, in public, who he is.
It began, fittingly, in a changing room. In 2022, at the very outset of what would become a career-defining run, Asake was photographed for a NATIVE Mag cover shoot trying on Ankara trousers from the Lagos skate label waf. “I like to wear old singlets,” he told his stylist, Momo Hassan-Odukale, a remark of such unpretentious clarity that it might have been lifted from a Savile Row fitting room, were the fabric not so resolutely Lagosian. That instinct for wearing what one likes, rather than what one is told to like, would prove to be the through-line of everything that followed.
From Streetwear to a Louder Wardrobe
The ‘Ololade Asake’ EP introduced an artist dressed in the vernacular of his own neighbourhood: oversized clothes, sneakers, jerseys, the unforced grammar of Lagos streetwear. His twisted locs, at this stage, were merely part of the ensemble rather than its centrepiece. There was, crucially, no sense of a pop star being assembled from a mood board; Asake simply looked like himself, only slightly amplified.
That amplification accelerated with ‘Mr. Money With The Vibe’. The trousers grew more voluminous, the accessories more declarative, the sunglasses and colours more insistent. It would have been easy for luxury and streetwear to cancel one another out, the way an ill-matched cufflink can ruin an otherwise decent suit, but Asake managed to let both coexist, each lending the other credibility. The locs, meanwhile, became a canvas of their own, appearing in shifting colours and configurations, as though he were rehearsing transformations he had not yet decided to make permanent.
Paris, Sculpture and a Momentous Haircut
By the ‘Work Of Art’ period, the interest in image had become unmistakably deliberate. Appearances at Paris Fashion Week, including shows for BOTTER and Sacai, found him in a futuristic cobalt-blue look one evening and a restrained all-black ensemble with a heavy chain the next, his locs by now sculptural rather than merely styled. Speaking to PAUSE Magazine that year, he described Fashion Week as “phenomenal,” and characterised fashion and music as two separate expressions of the same person, distinct yet inseparable, which is as neat a summary of the sartorial temperament as one is likely to find.
Then, in 2024, came the haircut. Asake cut off the locs that had followed him from the very beginning, the one constant through every prior reinvention, and in doing so opened what might be called his ‘Lungu Boy’ epoch. Rather than settling on a replacement signature, he moved restlessly between box braids, cornrows, cropped cuts and an afro, his appearance becoming, by design, unpredictable. Tattoos joined the visual vocabulary too: a striking “ASAKE” across the neck, and “Stay Real” across the hands. In his 2024 GQ profile, he explained the neck tattoo was acquired during a period of discouragement about his music career, a way, in his own words, of leaving himself no option but to keep going. It is a reminder that beneath the sculptural hair and the Parisian tailoring sits a rather more private set of motivations.
Military Tailoring and the M$NEY Era
The connection to home, meanwhile, never quite loosened its grip. Even amid international collaborations and cornrows, Asake’s clothing retained space for native fabrics and traditional silhouettes, a balance his early stylist Swazzi has attributed to his deliberate mixing of African designers with global brands, streetwear worn as fluently as agbada.
By 2025 the changes had become more spontaneous still: braids gave way to lower cuts, then coloured hair, then a clean fade, and eventually a shaved head. At the Grammys that year he appeared in a custom military-inspired outfit made with his friend PDF, offering the disarmingly simple explanation, “I’m in my military time.” Asked later by ESSENCE about his continual hair transitions, he again framed them as evolution rather than strategy, which tracks with everything that had come before.
The Real Thread in Asake’s Style Evolution
By the ‘M$NEY’ era, the question of Asake’s signature look had become close to unanswerable, there having been simply too many. Oversized silhouettes and streetwear references persist, now alongside luxury pieces and experimental styling that would have seemed implausible on the young man in Ankara trousers. Yet the underlying instinct, as he told GQ in 2024, dates back to childhood: “putting pieces together, trying to be different among everybody.”
It is tempting, as The Native notes, to divide his career into tidy chapters, each with its own defining look, but the reality is messier and rather more interesting: the eras overlap, old influences resurface, and the one constant is a willingness to discard whatever has grown too familiar, the locs included. There is no single outfit, no fixed signature, that captures Asake’s style evolution in full. What captures it instead is the freedom to keep becoming, era after era, with the confidence of a man who has never once dressed to impress anybody but himself.
Source: thenativemag.com. Keep listening on BlackFM Afrobeats radio.
