Torishéju Dumi is building a fashion brand on her own terms: ‘I’d rather play the long game’

British fashion designer Torishéju Dumi’s studio is located in the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham, part of a new outpost of Sarabande, the charitable foundation set up in 2006 by Lee Alexander McQueen that provides studio spaces for young artists to practise their craft. Taking over a pair of renovated Queen Anne buildings, built in the early 1700s for Sir Hugh Smithson, Duke of Northumberland, one was previously a warren of private flats, the other abandoned for half a century. The aim of the project, led by architecture studio F3 under the supervision of Sarabande director Trino Verkade, was one of minimal intervention, leaving the buildings’ original features in a state of perpetual decay: there are worn-away brick walls and doors bearing scratch marks from previous inhabitants, while original wallpaper, peeled and faded, is preserved behind glass, as one might find a wall of mosaics in a Roman ruin.

It feels like an apt home for Dumi’s eponymous label, Torishéju, which, despite its contemporary vision, is rooted in the past. In her collections, she undertakes similar acts of excavation and renovation, drawing on the contours of historical costume and radically shifting their context through clever manipulation of silhouette and fabric. Her pieces, which belong in the permanent collections of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, have a spectral quality, rendered largely in black. ‘Maybe because of my Catholic upbringing, I have always been fascinated with the otherworldly,’ she says, citing a love of horror, though not of the ‘blood and gore’ kind, but the gothic and the spiritual. ‘I’m always thinking: what else is out there?’

Born in north-west London to a Nigerian mother and Nigerian-Brazilian father, Dumi grew up attending Catholic church (the family later moved to Hertfordshire, then Buckinghamshire). As a child, she remembers making things with her hands, and though she knew little about fashion as an institution, she was always interested in clothing, with early memories of priestly robes and her mother’s wardrobe proving transformative. ‘There were certain bits of clothing I loved – like the sleeve of a jacket or the layers of a skirt – but I didn’t have a clear understanding of what fashion was,’ she says. After finishing school, she attended De Montfort University’s art foundation course in Leicester, allowing her a year of voracious experimentation across mediums. ‘It was the best experience of my life: for a year, every day, I just immersed myself in painting, or in the wood or metal workshop, or made things with clay.’

It was around this time that Dumi discovered the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan, who pioneered an alternative way of making fashion, one largely unburdened from commercial concerns. ‘I realised that fashion could be more than just clothing,’ she says. ‘I loved the craft of what they were doing, the worlds that they were creating.’

After her foundation, she took the Menswear BA at London College of Fashion (LCF), followed by the MA Fashion course, under Fabio Piras, at Central Saint Martins (CSM). She graduated in 2021, then briefly taught on the costume course at LCF before launching her first eponymous collection in 2023. Titled ‘Mami Wata’, its name references the water spirits that appear in both Nigerian and South American folklore; as such, garments were constructed to appear as if they had been submerged under water.

Drawing the attention of American stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, a rapid ascent followed: the following season, Dumi was showing her S/S 2024 collection as part of Paris Fashion Week, with Naomi Campbell opening the show. Using deadstock fabric given to her by designer Craig Green, the collection was titled ‘Fire on the Mountain’ and saw draped silhouettes and knotted forms recalling the traditional Nigerian lappa (a means of wrapping the body in fabric) meet elongated monastic overcoats and splashes of papal red. It was enough to convince Dover Street Market’s Adrian Joffe to purchase the collection for his stores. ‘I had made it in my Hackney flat on a domestic sewing machine, and then it was on the runway in Paris being worn by Naomi Campbell,’ says Dumi. ‘Afterwards, I thought I’d just come back to my life, to teaching. But then Adrian said he wanted to buy it, and I thought: what have I got myself in for?’

In 2025, she was awarded the Savoir Faire Prize at the LVMH Prize for Young Designers, and her clothing has been worn by the likes of Zendaya, Jack Harlow and Kendall Jenner, the latter choosing her to dress her for the Met Gala, which celebrated the opening of the Costume Institute exhibition ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’. Befitting the theme, Dumi’s grey tailored jacket with draped sleeves and matching skirt drew inspiration from queer Black Harlem Renaissance singer Gladys Bentley. She also used the look to reference her Nigerian heritage, with the jacket’s ties recalling the wrapped shirts she has memories of her grandfather wearing. This idea of cross-cultural pollination informs much of her work, particularly the way that British dress codes were both adopted and subverted by Nigerians as a result of colonial rule. ‘You see it even now, in the bowler hat, the suit jackets,’ she says. ‘But then they merged with these Nigerian fabric wraps, like the iro and the lappa. I want to explore that mix from a new perspective.’

These influences continue to inform her A/W 2026 collection, though the designer sees it as an evolution, noting a desire to ‘elevate’ the offering as she grows in experience. The severe nipped-waist on a tailored jacket recalls Christian Dior’s 1947 Bar jacket (here rewritten with twists of fabric on the chest, which might represent flowers or ‘black holes’), while elsewhere woven and knotted details, or extra sleeves designed to be tied around the body, continue to reference the lappa. Fabrics are a juxtaposition of coarse boiled wools and smooth duchesse satin – a textural expression of the state of in-between she likes to occupy in her work.

Currently working on her S/S 2027 collection, which she will show in September in Paris, Dumi speaks of her creative process with an almost spiritual fervour. In the run-up to starting a collection, she will often fast for 12 hours during the day, doing so until she hits on its essence. Then, she will work rapidly until the collection is completed, at least in its initial form. ‘I have to wait like six days for the idea to come out,’ she says. ‘But then it breaks free.’

Dumi believes that one day her practice will extend beyond clothing, perhaps to furniture or art. She says she cannot imagine not undertaking some kind of creative pursuit, though sometimes the demands of running a young label can be gruelling. She credits her will to continue to her close network of supporters: designer Craig Green, Sarabande’s Trino Verkade, Adrian Joffe, photographer Sølve Sundsbø, and her old tutors Fabio Piras (CSM) and Rory Mooney (LCF). ‘The people who I surround myself with are human,’ she says. ‘But they are also determined; they get things done by fire or force.’ One aspiration is to become a creative director of a house, which would make her a rare Black female designer in the role.

But for now, Dumi is in no rush. And she believes in fate: her A/W26 collection is titled ‘When It Rains, It Pours’, something her mother would often say, though she believes the adage applies to both the good and the bad. ‘It’s just this domino effect in life; certain things need to happen for other things to happen,’ she says. ‘But I’d rather play the long game and wait. Life is long, and I’m ready.’

A version of this article appears in the September 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Model: Tess Grootjen at Premium Models. Casting: Abi Corbett. Hair: Romain Duplessy at WSM Local production: Perrotte Production.