Ìtàn-Ventunna’s Anatomy of Restraint

By Josephine Agbonkhese

Fashion has a way of punishing clarity. Designers who know exactly what they want to say rarely get rewarded for saying it quietly. Bashir Adejumo’s Ìtàn -Yoruba for “story” is one of those collections that speaks in a voice so controlled, it almost dares you to misunderstand it.

Adejumo’s tailoring doesn’t seduce. It interrogates. The Aso Oke double-breasted jacket is executed with a rigor that verges on obsession stripes aligned with engineer’s precision, shoulders squared to military degree. It’s intelligent work, yes, but it also borders on the academic. The garment is so perfect it becomes theoretical, an argument about craftsmanship rather than an expression of it.

And maybe that’s the point. Ìtàn isn’t really about beauty. It’s about what happens when a designer stops trying to please. Adejumo isn’t performing African exuberance for a global audience. He’s translating Yoruba craftsmanship through an austere, almost liturgical lens draining colour to expose structure, stripping sentiment to reveal construction. It’s not “fusion.” It’s dissection.

The black cropped jacket and wide trousers that follow echo this discipline: silhouettes so severe they feel like architecture worn on skin. The tailoring is exquisite, but the emotional temperature is near zero. Adejumo seems to be asking: Can design exist without desire? Can identity survive without ornament?

It’s an uncomfortable question especially in an industry that still expects “African fashion” to sing, smile, and tell stories of joy. Ìtàn refuses all of that. Instead, Adejumo turns Yoruba fabric into a medium of resistance against cliché, against spectacle, against the lazy exoticism that too often passes for inclusion.

But restraint has its own violence. There are moments when Adejumo’s discipline curdles into anxiety,the cuts too tight, the symmetry too perfect. You sense the designer wrestling with self-censorship, terrified of excess, desperate to be taken seriously by a system that still sees heritage as aesthetic flavouring.

That internal conflict is what makes Ìtàn significant. It’s not a collection about comfort. It’s a collection about survival cultural, artistic, and personal. Adejumo isn’t chasing applause he’s trying to carve out a new design language that neither panders to the West nor romanticises home.

Technically, the work is exceptional. Conceptually, it’s provocative. Emotionally, it’s unnerving. Ìtàn doesn’t invite affection; it demands attention. It sits in the lineage of designers like Thebe Magugu and Grace Wales Bonner thinkers who use tailoring as philosophy. But Adejumo’s difference lies in his refusal of warmth. He’s not telling you a story; he’s dissecting what stories cost.

That’s what makes Ìtàn so arresting. It’s the sound of a designer pulling against his own boundaries too polished to collapse, too self-aware to surrender. Whether Adejumo lets go in his next collection will decide everything. For now, Ìtàn stands as an exquisite tension: craftsmanship on the edge of confession.