Model behaviour
Sylvia Owori is Uganda’s undisputed leading lady of fashion. Daniel Howden caught up with her in Kampala and found a woman who is as driven by her entrepreneurial spirit as by her creative flair
Pushing the boundaries of fashion in Africa has not always been a comfortable experience for Sylvia Owori. As a clothes-conscious teenager in 1980s Kampala she remembers when a simple miniskirt would cause a scandal.
Two decades on, the supremely confident Owori is now a recognised fashion designer, publisher of Uganda’s first women’s glossy magazine and a huge presence on her home country’s social scene. The first lady of East African fashion has a string of firsts behind her and a fierce reputation for getting what she wants. Most recently she expanded her chain of fashion boutiques with an outlet in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, and there’s more to come.
It has been a long journey, and it began in earnest in the less than glamorous setting of working-class Newham in South London. Realising that her passion for clothes was ahead of its time in her home country, Owori made the leap to the UK capital in search of some space in which to express herself. At 19, she started a new life in a council flat with her grandmother, whose husband is British.
What she remembers most isn’t the change in climate or the harsh urban setting, but the sense of liberation.
“Africa is part of me, but when I got to Europe I felt at home. I could relate to a lot of things,” Owori says. Her voice is full of laughter, but there is also a hard note: the sound of real ambition and more than a little life experience.
“Much of my inspiration has come from the West. I’m not just inspired by Africa,” she continues. Owori’s ambition is global and, despite a lifetime of hearing it, she insists that the word “no” is not in her vocabulary. She says: “I’m driven and I’m unafraid of starting out on new things. I want to be a leader.”
When she returned home to Uganda with a diploma in fashion design from Newham College, there was little alternative to being a pioneer. The fashion canvas was entirely blank. “I wanted to go home and teach people what I had learned,” she explains. “For myself it’s been fashion, for other women it’s the law or something else. You must use whatever strength you have.”
The word ‘empowerment’ is a constant refrain and an understandable call from someone who remembers her mother’s tough existence bringing up seven children. Her father died when she was young and her memories of him are coloured by his darker side and the fact that he would beat her mother. Talking about her mother is the one time Owori sounds uncertain.
“I don’t know if I could do it, take on seven children. She had little education and put us all through school. She had to work in a lot of small businesses. We barely saw her,” she recalls. While Owori describes her mother as supportive, she also remembers her disappointment that her daughter wasn’t going to be a lawyer or a doctor.
Instead, she came back a fashion designer. But where to start? In need of clothes and then models, Owori decided to strike out on her own, setting up the country’s first fashion house and modelling agency in 1999. The doubters were legion. “Everyone believed you couldn’t have a fashion industry in Uganda,” she says. “Some people even thought it was prostitution to have a model agency.”
Now Owori is among the first names on the invitation list for social events in Kampala, but back then she was accused of being a pimp. “We did fashion shows with platform heels and miniskirts and it caused an outcry,” she remembers. “Uganda is a very conservative country. The parents would say to me: ‘No, you are not going to spoil our kids.’ They said I was promoting prostitution and that it was degrading.”
By 2000, she had held her first show, the ‘Face of Africa’, although she insists her influences are not confined to her home continent. In 2004 she launched her own eponymous couture label, which is sold exclusively in Kampala and Nairobi. “I’m not a typical African designer,” she explains. “You don’t see the same things every season and I’m not only promoting African materials. My clothing is a mix that can be worn all over the world.”
A key moment came in 2001, she believes, when she was asked to take over the Miss Uganda beauty pageant, a previously ho-hum affair that had stagnated for years. “I knew we had to think big,” she says. “My inspiration was the Oscars. We went for the full red-carpet treatment.”
Her reputation, at home and abroad, was underlined three years ago when she was asked to produce the costumes for the Oscar-winning film The Last King of Scotland, depicting the rise and fall of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Owori’s collections have ranged from interpretations of 60s-style Jackie O outfits to her latest venture, adapting a traditional formal dress. “In Uganda we have a traditional dress, the buswti.” A brightly coloured, complicated garment, it has to be swathed onto the person wearing it. “It’s beautiful but uncomfortable, and you have to wear other clothes inside – you can’t wear it all day. I’m going to modernise it and make it into something you can wear every day,” she says.
Her personal style is changeable. “I like very bright colours, yellows and reds, the colours that stand out and get noticed. I like to express what I’m feeling. Wearing yellow means I feel very confident, black means I’m feeling a bit down.”
Another successful attempt to break new ground has seen the magazine African Woman hit shelves across the Great Lakes region. At first glance it’s a conventional glossy women’s title, but the mix of articles moves from style tips to searing accounts from former Child Soldiers. The tireless Owori isn’t stopping there either. A television show about day-to-day issues is her latest project.
“I like to help empower women,” she says, and then comes the ambition: “I want to be bigger than Oprah.”