A Designer Has Said Why International Models Skip Lagos

Fashion

Lagos · Sunday 13 September 2026

Bethel Brown, co-founder of the Nigerian label ShugaBraun, has named payment, security and infrastructure as the reasons international models and designers avoid fashion shows in Nigeria, and said the country needs to build platforms that can compete.

fashion show backstage rail garments Photograph by Armen Aydinyan via Unsplash.

Payment is first for a reason

A model flying into a market takes a booking on the assumption the fee arrives. Nigerian shows have a reputation, deserved or not, for paying late, paying partially, or paying after the agency has chased it, and an agency that has been burned once simply stops offering the country to its roster. That decision is made in an office abroad and is invisible here.

The obstacle	Who can fix it
Fees paid late or short	Organisers, immediately, at no cost
Security for visiting talent	Organisers and the state
Venues, power, load-in, backstage	Capital investment, years

The first row is the cheapest to fix and the most damaging when it is not.

Why this matters beyond vanity. International models on a Lagos runway are not the goal in themselves. They are a signal to buyers, press and stockists that a show is worth attending, and buyers are the people who turn a collection into orders. A show that nobody outside Nigeria attends is a very expensive party.

Nigerian fashion does not have a talent gap. It has a reliability gap, and reliability is the cheapest thing on the list to build.

The argument this sits inside

Nonnistics is presenting its spring/summer 2027 collection in New York today, which is the other way Nigerian houses solve this problem: go to where the buyers already are. Both routes are legitimate. Only one of them builds anything in Lagos, and it is the harder one.

Reporting: Vanguard.

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