Duro Olowu was born in 1965 in Lagos, to a Nigerian father and a Jamaican mother. He trained as a lawyer before moving permanently to London in his twenties and opening a small label in 2004. His Duro dress — a high-waisted, empire-line silhouette in four clashing prints, released in 2005 — was named Dress of the Year by American and British Vogue simultaneously. Olowu was thirty-nine and had been in fashion for a year.

The Clientele

Michelle Obama, as First Lady, wore Duro Olowu fourteen times between 2009 and 2013, including for the first State of the Union address of the second term. Iman, Linda Evangelista, Solange Knowles, Amal Clooney, Thandiwe Newton, and Uzo Aduba have been regular private clients. His prints — generally four to six per garment, often drawn from Yoruba adire, Ghanaian kente, Dutch wax, and 1970s Italian archive — have become a specific design signature widely credited with reopening the Western couture conversation about print.

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A dress is a small place. If you have room for one print, you have room for four. — Duro Olowu

The Curatorial Work

Since 2011, Olowu has increasingly worked as a curator. His 2016 exhibition Making and Unmaking, at the Camden Arts Centre, and his 2020 exhibition Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, have been read as extending his design practice into museum space. Both exhibitions grouped objects — paintings, photographs, African textiles, sculptural furniture — by chromatic and patterned association rather than chronological or national category. The approach has been influential on museum curation more broadly.

He continues to design, to curate, and to operate from London. He is fifty-nine at the time of writing.