Autumn Adeigbo (Q3797)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Autumn Adeigbo is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Autumn Adeigbo |
Autumn Adeigbo is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Autumn Adeigbo took a well-deserved vacation last year. The designer has seen incredible growth at her company since launching in 2018, including securing VC funding and mentors such as Tory Burch. She was overdue for a vacation, and, as it happens, it ended up serving her work well. “I allowed myself some time off and went to Malibu, and I stayed at a ranch, a really beautiful ranch and they had horses and cows,” Adeigbo said. Which explains the equestrian motifs and Western aesthetics in her fall 2023 collection.The clothes are filled with portraits of horses, plaid, and fringe. There are even a few pairs of chaps in faux-suede. Adeigbo is known for her midi and mini dresses with big sleeves and bold textiles. These prairie-lite dresses work well with the Americana fabrics used this season, such as a watercolor-esque brown plaid and a creamy taffeta. The horse decal becomes kitschy in some places, but looks best on the sleeves and hem of a black day dress with a ruched bodice. Giddy up!
3 March 2023
Autumn Adeigbo has gained a coterie of high profile celebrity fans and investors, including Tory Burch and Gabrielle Union, for offering colorful printed dresses and separates with feminine details. Spring 2023 was primarily inspired by a dainty floral fabric in four poppy shades of blue, green, yellow, and pink. The silhouettes are familiar to Adeigbo’s customers and fans: asymmetrical ruffled skirts, crop tops with puffed sleeves, and cutouts at the waist. At the moment she seems focused on perfecting her formula rather than expanding it in different directions.That said, there were moments of whimsy throughout the collection, mostly via the styling. She introduced satin kitten heels in candy colors with sparkly straps, and experimented with sequins and sheer white fabric stamped with duck yellow bubbles. Adeigbo called out the looks that mixed Italian and African printed separates in similar colors. The slight clash was fresh, especially when paired with head scarves and gloves in the same prints. It speaks to the potential of the clothes, but doesn’t force artistic discordance on anybody.
10 September 2022
When Autumn Adeigbo released an exclusive resort collection last year for Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman, she had a revelation. “I have a little bit more experience with holiday parties than I do with vacationing,” she laughs, before admitting that it’s been three years since she’s taken a break. This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Adeigbo’s rise over the past few years.Adeigbo launched her eponymous label in 2018 and by 2020 had secured $1 million in VC funding. Early supporters included Tory Burch and Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake. Just last month, Adeigbo announced her first celebrity investors: Gabrielle Union, Cameron Diaz, and Mila Kunis. Reportedly, Adeigbo has now raised approximately $4.2 million. She’s also expanded categories into footwear, handbags, and other accessories.It’s a testament to the clothes’ mass appeal. Adeigbo takes items that otherwise saturate the market—printed dresses with atypical sleeves, midriff cut-outs, or peekaboo panels—and makes them just that much funkier and cooler. A floor-length, puff-sleeved dress with an empire waistline and a squared-off neck could be written off as yet another dress inspired byBridgerton’s rise, but with a fully beaded bodice contrasting with the jacquard skirt, it’s undeniably elevated.For resort—which she calls holiday—Adeigbo wanted to “tap into that celebratory feeling of people coming together again.” It’s a season of party clothes: crushed velvet minis with a satin, heart-shaped bodice and matching gloves; ’80s prom dresses with two glittery bows and a full skirt you can hear swishing through the photos; many, many semi-transparent boned corsets. Most of the dresses come with coordinating hair bands, scrunchies, gloves, or some combination thereof—head-to-toe dressing, Adeigbo-style. You get the sense that every single one of these garments would like a glass of champagne, please.
8 July 2022
For fall 2022, Autumn Adeigbo wanted to create the feeling of a “Parisian house party” in New York. The collection of flirty corset tops and minidresses paired with clogs and mid-calf boots suggests a wine and cheese party rather than a rager, but the French influences are still there.Perhaps no look says Parisian house party as much as Look 10: a polka-dot long-sleeve crop top and matching miniskirt. With midriff floss around the waist and a coordinating beret, it’s straight out ofEmily in Paris. Adeigbo has become known for this kind of bold-printed ensemble. Aside from the dots, she incorporated butterflies, plaids, tiger stripes, and abstract, colorful florals into the collection. Each feels girlish and sophisticated; youthful without being cloyingly innocent. The butterfly motif that turned up not just on large-scale prints but also as embellishments on knitwear symbolizes “us coming out of the cocoon of the past few years,” said the designer.The collection is rounded out by lace-up leggings, wide-leg leather pants, and perforated leather streetwear (the brand’s first dip into logomania). They contrast with the clogs with bright jeweled buckles that Adeigbo says they can barely keep in stock. As such, she expanded her footwear offerings with some mid-calf snakeskin boots. Shoes for stomping around the Seine and elsewhere.
31 March 2022
Last year, Autumn Adeigbo made headlines as the 36th Black woman to raise $1 million in venture capital funding. She’s the first to do so for a fashion brand—a coup for several reasons, among them fashion’s history of exclusion and its generally risky business reputation. Adeigbo is breaking conventions left and right. Her label is growing rapidly—Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus are her latest retail partners—and she’s carved out a niche in the competitive, often homogenous contemporary market. With a mix of jewel tones, African wax prints, and Victorian details, Adeigbo’s dresses and blazers are audacious yet relatable. She’s spent years refining her fits and proportions, and her baby doll minis, party tops, and puffed-sleeve blazers speak to women of varying ages and tastes.For spring 2022, Adeigbo pivoted from the clashing patterns of last season to a different kind of OTT style: head-to-toe prints. Several looks involved a top, skirt, bag, bucket hat, and clogs in the same motif, from a vaguely Southwestern jacquard to a wallpaper floral to an ankara print aswirl with juicy red hearts. Plenty of women will stick to just one piece, maybe adding the designer’s crystal-buckle clog in black or burgundy, but others will delight in the range of matching options.Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that Adeigbo seems to be resisting the urge to make “salable” basics or water down her ideas, despite her growth and expansion plans. She has an uncompromising vision, and her commitment to avoiding excess and waste means there’s little room for pieces she doesn’t believe in.
10 November 2021
Investors and venture capital rarely come up in my Fashion Week chats, partly because splashy VC funding is such a rarity for emerging designers. Investors tend to write off fashion as too risky, mainly because there are no guarantees; designers have to predict what will sell, and quite possibly, they’ll be wrong. That doesn’t gel with VC expectations for rapid “unicorn”-style growth. Cautionary tales abound, too, of buzzy brands that failed to meet their hyped-up valuations.Autumn Adeigbo is working to change that narrative. Known for bold, colorful dresses that mix Italian brocades, African wax prints, and Victorian silhouettes, she recently became the 36th Black woman to raise more than $1 million in venture capital—and, remarkably, the first to do so for a fashion brand. Among her 15 backers are female-focused firms like Pipeline Angels and fans-turned-investors like Katrina Lake, the founder and CEO of Stitch Fix, whodescribedAdeigbo’s appeal as such: “I love her bright, bold point of view that is so uniquely hers, but at the same time [is] universally appealing.”Adeigbo has struck that balance by focusing on her customer, not press, for the past six years. Since launching in 2018, she’s prioritized getting to know her fans (namely through traveling trunk shows), refining her fits and fabrics, and establishing a fair-trade supply chain—hurdles many designers wait to clear until they’ve already broken through. Business-wise, she’s also leaned on mentors like Tory Burch; in 2019, Adeigbo was chosen as a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow and joined a network of women entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses.All to say, this is just the beginning. Adeigbo’s fall 2021 collection offers a glimpse of her brand’s next chapter, with two new product categories: shoes (peep the distinctive and comfy pony-hair clogs) and what Adeigbo described as “the perfect computer bag,” a compact tote scaled-down to fit the smaller, sleeker laptops and tablets we use today. Both the shoes and bags came with sparkly crystal buckles, because why not? Adeigbo is a maximalist, and it comes through most in her print-clashing dresses. A puffed-sleeve number was aswirl with fuchsia, cobalt, and saffron brocade, while a sleeker viscose dress came in a graphic, Ankara-inspired peacock motif that nodded to her family’s Nigerian roots. (If some pieces felt a little over-styled in the look book, women will be drawn to their one-and-done ease in stores.
)There are lots of printed dress labels on the market, but we can’t think of another that combines African motifs with vintage silhouettesandeco-friendly fabrics like Adeigbo’s—and, as the designer pointed out, few are run by Black women. She hopes women everywhere, of every background, will appreciate the multi-cultural spirit of the clothes, and hopes they’ll be inspired to continue supporting other Black-owned businesses, too.
27 April 2021