THE JOURNAL
Self portrait, London, July 2021. Photograph by Mr Ibrahim Kamara/Art + Commerce
Mr Ibrahim “Ib” Kamara is the most important man in fashion that you’ve probably never heard of. One of the brightest and most trusted young stylists in the industry, his influence on fashion right now is hard to overstate. He has worked on the runway shows of some of the loftiest menswear brands, collaborating closely with Mr Virgil Abloh to style the shows for Louis Vuitton and Off-White and with Mr Riccardo Tisci for Burberry, as well as making hats for Comme des Garçons. He held the position of senior fashion editor-at-large for i-D Magazine before being appointed editor-in-chief of Dazed magazine in January. By any measure, his blossoming career – barely a decade in – is a roaring success. But to him? It’s a little more complicated.
“I don’t feel like a success at all, if I’m honest with you,” he says. Back home in London after a month working in Paris, and speaking to MR PORTER via Zoom, he’s not sure the modern world’s definition of success quite matches his own. “Success is such a complex word, because our society looks at names and attachments and sees that as successful, but that’s not how I see it.”
Softly spoken with a west African lilt that occasionally peeps through his vowels, Kamara is self-deprecating and grounded, his own harshest critic. “Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the time, I don’t really like my work,” he says. “I can criticise my own work first before you can criticise it. I know what’s wrong with it. If you point out other things, I can take that on board. And I want to get better and better and better, because it’s never good enough, to be honest. And I think the day that I feel that it is good enough, then I don’t want to style any more. There will be no point.”
“My sisters and mum always drag my work. It’s one place of complete, brutal honesty. I need that balance”
Born in Sierra Leone and brought up in The Gambia, Kamara moved to London to join his mother when he was 16. A young west African boy suddenly supplanted in a strange land where “even the buses seemed surreal”, for the first two years he struggled to make friends and adjust. Originally on the path to be a GP, at his parents’ behest, he dropped out of his medical studies and began a course doing textiles and art at Westminster Kingsway College. Thanks to his mentors there (“a woman called Bernie, who helped kids from poor backgrounds get into good universities and gave me confidence, and my teacher, John Bellwood”), he found out about Central Saint Martins, applied and got in. From there, his star has continued to rise.
Are his parents now pleased that the whole doctor thing didn’t work out and he ended up as fashion’s man of the moment? “To be honest, they don’t really care, and I’m OK with that,” he says. “My mum still thinks I’m a tailor, which is fab, I think. It makes it easier for her to understand what I do. I kind of like that they don’t care, because it’s a reality check for me. My sisters and mum always drag my work. It’s one place of complete, brutal honesty. They couldn’t give a damn if I just did a huge fashion show and I love that. I need that balance.”
During his time at Central Saint Martins, Kamara began assisting the stylists Messrs Simon Foxton, Barry Kamen and Judy Blame, notable creatives from the generation that shaped the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. “They, for me, were sort of outsiders who did their own thing,” says Kamara. “They didn’t do what everyone else was doing. Barry and I would talk about everything else but fashion and that blew my mind because I was so young, because I was learning and downloading so much from him. And their work feels very distinct. You know a Judy Blame picture when you see one.”
So what about an Ib Kamara picture? Like his mentors’, the pictures he creates with photographers are immediately recognisable and provide that increasingly rare “wow” that makes you to stop scrolling through Instagram for a moment to take it all in.
Often noted for pushing the boundaries of black masculinity and shining a light on his African heritage, Kamara’s photos represent an authentic, arresting beauty rarely seen in the white-dominated Western media. Refreshingly, and like some of the best styling, his work is not really even about the clothes. Instead, it invites us into a fantasy world.
His models may hold cigarettes or knives, their faces might be obscured by gas masks or they could be flanked by a giant bird, wielding gilded spears or sporting ermine-lined crowns. In one image, shot by frequent collaborator Mr Rafael Pavarotti, a model bends forward in a pair of diamond buckled stilettos, angel wings on her back and taking aim with an AK-47 rifle.
“I’m not afraid to fail – it’s the only way you can learn. It makes me want to think even harder about how I can make it better”
“There are a lot of guns in my work and a lot of people criticise this, but I think it’s because they’re looking at my work from a Western point of view,” says Kamara. “And people in the West usually look at the gun as a symbol of violence and all this kind of stuff. Mind you, it was invented here. The guns in my work represent survival, trying to survive and defend.”
These references are informed by what’s going on in the world that Kamara sees on the news and are also nods to his childhood. “I went through a war growing up in Sierra Leone and you see how people dress to survive,” he says.
Kamara credits his childhood with giving power to his imagination. “I didn’t have access to so much pop [culture] and so much Western influence growing up, so I was able to use my own imagination with the space that I had,” he says. “Me and my friends would make our own Barbie dolls and really use our imaginations because we were not spoon fed a lot of visuals. I think that’s maybe what helps me in a way because I can log off from everything else that I’m seeing in the world and still use my imagination to create, because I rely on that a lot.”
Kamara has a calm innocence about him – that childlike imagination is present in everything he does – but there’s a wild side there, too. While at university in the early 2010s, he would go out to Loverboy, Mr Charles Jeffrey’s east London club night, dressed in skirts or lingerie.
“I’m lucky to have grown up in Africa and in London,” he says. “I was also influenced by the club kids and club culture, so I’m always mixing those worlds together, and knowing I come from such a rich cultural background, so much music and references. The people I grew up with, it’s lucky there was no camera to record it because it would make such a good film. The drama, the looks, the chaos.”
Kamara is continuing to refine his work to be the best he can be, not focusing on success or failure or on what that means to others, but forging ahead and creating regardless. “There are some things I’ve done and I think, ‘Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t have put that hat on that look.’ So, there are little failures that I look at, but I’m not afraid to fail because I think it’s the only way you can learn. There’s always a way around a failure. It makes me want to think even harder about how I can make it better.”
During the pandemic, he’s started picking up the camera again, wants to write more and get into making films. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that Kamara doesn’t think he’s made it yet. To the rest of us, he looks like he’s on top of the world; from his point of view, he’s just getting started.