Aso-oke had been quietly waiting. The hand-loomed strip cloth that has been worn by Yoruba families for several centuries — at coronations, at funerals, at engagement ceremonies, at the weddings where every cousin gets a roll cut from the same bolt — had not gone away. It had just stopped being fashionable in the secular, urban, music-industry sense of the word. It was reverent and ceremonial. It was not, for a long stretch in the 2010s, what the Lagos creative class wore to be photographed.
That has begun, audibly, to change. When a celebrated Nigerian artist arrives at a public event in full aso-oke — agbada cut from the heaviest cloth, cap pleated to a tight conical fold, the cloth itself thrumming with metallic gold thread — what he is doing is not a costume choice. He is running a small, deliberate signal. The cloth that was your grandfather's is now, again, the cloth of the man at the centre of the room.
This kind of return happens periodically in fashion. Velvet returns. Indigo returns. The trick with cultural cloth, though, is that it never fully left. Aso-oke was being woven, every week, in workshops across Iseyin and Oyo and Ede, by women whose mothers wove and whose daughters would weave. What changed was not the supply but the willingness of the modern, internet-shaped Nigerian to wear it as a statement of presence rather than ancestry.
The cloth always made the man. It is now also making him cool.
The implications travel quickly. A Lagos creative wearing aso-oke for an album-cover photograph means that an aso-oke shop in Ibadan will get five new orders by Friday. A music video shot in full traditional sets the tone for half a year of brand campaigns and editorial spreads. The hand-weavers, who do not have Instagram, hear about it later through their daughters. The weave on next month's loom is the same weave it was last year. The price has, very gently, gone up.
What the new attention does, beyond economics, is something subtler. It teaches a generation that the most contemporary thing you can wear is, sometimes, the oldest thing in your mother's wardrobe. The bride who wore aso-oke at her grandmother's wedding will tie a length of it as her gele on her own. The groom whose father has never worn aso-oke in public except at weddings will now wear it on a Saturday for no reason at all. The cloth was patient. It is being rewarded for its patience.