MOWALOLA SS27- THE HUNGER

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There is an expectation attached to what power should look like. In fashion, and  particularly for women in positions of authority, it has often meant the suit: shoulders  sharpened, body contained, sensuality exchanged for seriousness. Mowalola Ogunlesi  has little interest in playing along. “I’m running my company, and I wouldn’t dress like a  ‘CEO’,” she says in the notes accompanying The Hunger, her Spring/Summer 2027  collection. Instead, Mowalola proposes another possibility: what if sensuality isn't  something a woman has to surrender in order to be powerful? 

The answer is worn close to the skin. Chiffon becomes almost indistinguishable from  the body beneath it; bras glitter against bare torsos; leather traces rather than conceals  the figure. Organza pencil skirts sit low on the hips against snakeskin waistbands, while  lingerie is treated as officewear and tailoring is rendered sheer. Across a palette that  frequently mirrors flesh itself, the distinction between body and garment begins to  dissolve. These are clothes that reveal, but the women wearing them never appear  exposed. 

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That distinction matters. The Hunger returns Mowalola to the autonomy, sensuality and  liberation that defined the brand from its beginning, but there is greater control in how  those ideas are expressed. The collection is remarkably reduced. Silhouettes are  narrow, surfaces do much of the work and familiar pieces are stripped almost to their  foundations. Where delicacy appears, something harder is rarely far away: suede  underwear meets glossy leather, translucent fabrics meet snakeskin and perspex  jewellery sits against tactile skins. Femininity is allowed to be soft and dangerous at  once. 

Mowalola calls her approach to glamour “decayed”, and some of the collection's most  compelling moments emerge from that attraction to beauty slightly corrupted. Eelskin  dresses, glitter-coated canvas bras and gowns hand-beaded in Nigeria elevate  materials through craft, while the closing gown takes destruction more literally.  Created with Tô Genesis from fragments of smashed plastic plates, its surface  transforms something broken into an object of desire. Glamour here doesn't need to be  pristine to be seductive. 

Men enter The Hunger under a different set of rules. Where womenswear positions  desire as power, Mowalola describes menswear through surrender. The silhouettes  remain disciplined tight trousers, shirting, leather but their surfaces destabilise  conventional masculinity. Snakeskin slips from collars and cuffs, denim is foiled,  leather bronzed and cotton given an almost wet shine. The men aren't excluded from the collection's sensual world; they're absorbed by it, their armour made deliberately  more vulnerable. 

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That push and pull between control and surrender gives The Hunger its name. Desire is  everywhere, but Mowalola seems less interested in who is being looked at than in who  gets to decide what being desired means. For the women at its centre, showing the  body does not diminish authority. It becomes another way of claiming it. 

That's why the collection's near-nakedness never feels empty. Beneath all that skin is a  surprisingly precise proposition about identity: a woman should not have to dress  herself into somebody else's visual language of power to prove that she possesses it.  Mowalola already runs the company. She can decide what the CEO looks like.