Friday, March 29, 2024

I love to dress people properly, says Okereke

Yolande Okereke lives for making celebrities gorgeous on red carpets. Over the years, she has styled the likes of Rita Dominic, Funke Akindele, Kate Henshaw, Ini Edo, Jimmy Jatt and many more.

She has been doing this for ten years. Though she started as a fashion designer, she decided to put her label on hold because she needed to explore styling more.

“I started fashion in 2006 and I later moved into styling and designing of costumes for films. But while I am styling my client, I get involved in all the processes, from picking the fabric to the sewing and the style,” Okereke says.

As an undergraduate, she made a lot of money from fashion designing. But once she explored styling, she got stuck and would not let go of it.

According to her, it’s interesting telling people how they should look and for them to also later admit you did a nice job. Okereke further says she ventured into styling with the mindset of changing certain things in the movie industry.

I am not a fashion designer, I am a stylist and I style both men and women

She was appalled by the sight of men wearing oversized suits or combining awkward colours. “All those things I saw were wrong and I wanted to do them properly.

I didn’t enter the industry to be famous, though it came along the way. All I wanted was proper representation of characters in movies and in the industry.

“I am not a fashion designer, I am a stylist and I style both men and women. A fashion designer is one who makes clothes from the scratch. She gets the fabric, cuts and sows it.

The stylist sees the dress and decides if it would work for the person or not. The stylist collects the dress from the fashion designer and puts it on someone.

A fashion designer is not necessarily a stylist and a stylist is not necessarily a fashion designer. But we have some people who perform the two roles,” she explains.

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