Osakwe’s clients see her clothes as an illicit escape, intimidating but inviting. Photograph by Lakin Ogunbanwo for The New Yorker

On Saturday night in Lagos, Nigeria, women are restless with anticipation. On the mainland, where slums built atop landfills run into middle-class housing estates, a young hair stylist is putting on makeup and taming her mane of extensions, getting ready to meet her older boyfriend for drinks. On the island in the city’s center, where wealth and political power are concentrated, a twentysomething ad executive in a clingy dress is going with her friends to a club; if she doesn’t find a man she likes, she’ll text a friend, who is rich and good-looking, though not ready to settle down. The fact that there is church tomorrow is barely in the back of their minds. A decade ago, they would have been expected to attend services regularly, to dress conservatively, and to save their virginity for their husbands. They are still expected to convey the appearance of doing most of those things. So they see the men they want, and then wake up the next morning, dress carefully, and make it to church for the last service; it is still, after all, a great place to meet men.

A few days before the weekend began, Amaka Osakwe, the designer of the fashion line Maki Oh, welcomed a private client into her atelier, in a serene enclave on the island filled with walled mansions and cultivated greenery. The showroom had deep-purple walls and rows of clothes on hangers suspended from bronze chains. Behind the space was a bare office and Osakwe’s studio, where tailors bent over sketches and bolts of fabric.

Her client, a bubbly twenty-seven-year-old woman named Bidemi Zakariyau, who owns a public-relations company, hugged Osakwe and admired the furniture.

“Do you want to get started?” Osakwe said in a singsong voice. “New season!” She led Zakariyau into a dressing room, where pieces from the latest collection hung on a rack.

“You know the white top I sent you a message about?” Zakariyau said. “You know I always send you multiple messages—‘I want this, I want this.’ ”

Osakwe laughed. “Which white one?” she asked. Her assistant produced a low-cut top of translucent tulle, so delicate that it resembled a necklace hung with white tinsel.

“This is what I’m wearing for my boyfriend’s birthday,” Zakariyau said happily, examining herself in a mirror. Osakwe, in a loose black tunic and pants, started pinning the top. She fussed around Zakariyau, occasionally murmuring approval but saying little else.

When the top fit properly, Zakariyau walked out of the dressing room to show it to a friend who was also in the atelier that day. The friend scrutinized the sheer fabric and her exposed cleavage and made a dubious face. “Where are you going to wear this to, in Nigeria?” he asked.

“We’re going overseas!” Zakariyau said. “But you can—” She mimicked flaunting her chest. “You’re just out, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it,” Osakwe said.

In Nigeria, where I lived for three years, this is not an uncontroversial view. The country is deeply religious, split almost evenly between Christians and Muslims, and a woman’s standing is tied to her adherence to sexual mores. Women are treated like minors until they become wives and mothers. Even in Lagos, which is relatively liberal, an electrician who comes to a woman’s apartment to fix a light switch might refuse to address her unless her boyfriend is present; a middle-aged man in a parking dispute with a young woman might call her a “harlot” and take off his belt as if to discipline her. One recent morning, while I was trying to hail a taxi on a busy avenue on the island, two men advised me that I’d probably get raped wearing what I had on: a shirtdress that fell a couple of inches above my knees.

Osakwe is obsessed with the female form and seduction, subversive interests for a Nigerian woman. “That’s where I find beauty,” she said. “I took anatomy classes, and I would always find more inspiration in female anatomy. I never really cared for dangling phalluses.” Her clothes wrestle with ideas of desire, sexual pleasure, and female autonomy; they are sensual and provocative, with cutouts, high slits, and sheer fabrics.

While her designs have often shocked Nigerian audiences, Osakwe is unassuming; she is slight, and usually wears glasses with large black frames, with her hair in skinny braids. She speaks in a husky whisper, and often makes eye contact with a point in the distance. “She is more the observer, smiling in a quiet place on the edge of the room,” her friend Papa Omotayo told me. Her favored pastimes—photography, watching anime—are solitary. “It’s my form of therapy,” Osakwe said. “Sometimes I just want to be away from human beings.” She is wary of large social situations, and small ones. Even her clients sometimes complain about the difficulty of reaching her. But, in the past seven years, Osakwe has become West Africa’s most celebrated designer, with work exhibited in the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York; the Vitra Design Museum, in Germany; and the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, in England. “She has a very clear voice,” Yegwa Ukpo, a cultural critic and co-founder of a Lagos fashion store called Stranger, said. “It feels very neurotic and prickly. There’s a friction, and there’s a crackling electricity that doesn’t feel safe. It implies a sort of energy that you don’t often see associated with black women.”

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Osakwe’s career coincides with a subtle change in Nigeria. Women are working more and making more money; with that increased power, they are pushing against long-standing norms. Female organizers helped pass an act prohibiting violence against women, and a senate bill to ban “indecent dressing” was defeated. Still, abortion remains illegal in most cases, and nearly half of girls marry before they are eighteen. Amina Mama, a women’s-studies professor at the University of California, Davis, said, “When it comes to sexual freedoms, our society is rushing backward to a colonial, missionary idea. It’s almost as if they are overreacting to progress in women’s rights.” Osakwe’s clothes, for clients who can afford them, are both armor and lingerie: intimidating but inviting, with unyielding lines and delicate materials. They reflect her sense that Nigerian women are constantly negotiating how tough or how soft to be in a patriarchal society. “I’m living this also, and it’s still something I haven’t got the exact formula for,” Osakwe said. “I don’t think any woman has, and every woman makes a choice at a cost to something.”

One breezy afternoon, in the courtyard of Osakwe’s studio, an artisan was bent over a table, applying hot wax to white silk with a small brush. He reached repeatedly into a pot on a portable stove to paint rows of the word “OH,” a motif Osakwe has often used. (Like “Maki Oh,” it plays on her name.) When he finished, the fabric would be sent to a workshop in the southwestern city Osogbo, where it would be saturated with a vivid blue dye made from indigo leaves; then the wax would be removed, revealing white letters. The fabric, called adire, is a centuries-old craft of the Yoruba people, who created prints that communicate messages or observations. Osakwe is repurposing traditional motifs, while inventing her own. “With adire, it’s always used as a hidden conversation about the collection,” she said. In one collection, about the vagaries of romance, she used a mat motif, representing the bed given to newlyweds in the hope that they have many children, and a comb motif, which women wear to say “I’m angry at you.”