Killa Pink💘 Abiola in London: The Collab That Never Made The Cut

“It’s not wow, do your findings” – Annie Idibia

On a spring morning in April, Abiola Olusola and I met up in Woolwich. She’d taken the train down from the suburbs, and we found ourselves sitting across from each other at brunch. We’d followed each other for years on Instagram, though I couldn’t recall when she’d started. This was our first meeting in person.

Our catch-up was her second taste of how the Black fashion girlie in London shops. Rich, qualitative data that, if you’ve ever cracked open a business book or studied consumer psychology, you’d be scribbling notes over. The first taste was the month prior where I jokingly hounded her about the sensational Hachi dress I had just seen on my friend, photographer Mikey Oshai’s story. It was a night out clip of him and Igbo Malaysian artist Yagazie Emezi. I can’t remember what they were doing — all I wanted to know was THAT dress, and I dove headfirst into Abiola’s DMs thirsty for one. I was sold.


Somewhere between sausage baps and folded arms, she told me something I’ll never forget:

“I miss your old Instagram.”

Not sheepishly, not defensively, but with relief. She missed Bow Bells, my old account; the raw, layered, sometimes contradictory but always authentic archive. She said Instagram was boring now, uninspiring, all performance and no pulse. She loved how I dressed, how I posted, how I existed alongside another Igbo woman she admired, Ogo Offodile, who once styled Solange. “Bring it back,” she pleaded.

That was April 28th. By September, the same Abiola who mourned the loss of authenticity on Instagram was archiving my work, erasing my contributions, and overlaying Emily in Paris soundtracks on unfiltered Black British brilliance.

This is the story of Abiola in London, the collaboration that spanned SS25 but was wiped off the ’gram in a child-like tantrum. It’s also the story of Killa Pink: the latest colourway from my brand, a vest top you can buy after reading (context × commerce), as a reminder that what looks soft is often sharpest.

Emily in Paris vs. Abiola in London

“Crediting isn’t controversial, it’s standard. Beyoncé still credits her stylists, Virgil did too.” — Ayotunde, Jendaya

Abiola brought me on as a brand consultant and commercial strategist in May, because she was disillusioned. She told me about the false promises of 2020: Western retail buyers fell over themselves during the sugar rush of Black Lives Matter. By 2025, the hangover had set in. The articles were written, the hashtags filed, the stockists retreated into silence. Some invoices unpaid. Prestige meant nothing.

She said she was done chasing European validation. No more Net-A-Porter dreaming. No more scrambling for stockists overseas. She wanted to fortify her direct-to-consumer channel, to connect with diaspora women who had proven to be the real buyers of her brand. Black women in Lagos. Black women in New York. Black women in London. That’s where the money was; I saw it in her sales data.



The African Gaze: Grace Onyi at home. Photography by @olu_hd. Artwork by Hamed Maiye. Book by Amy Sall. Onyi wears a vintage Toni Braxton t-shirt, Lululemon shorts and Adidas socks. Sunglasses courtesy of Ayotunde Rufai @jendaya.

When the moment came to give credit - a simple tag under my legacy profile, Igbo Girl in London - Abiola reached for respectability politics. I can’t help but wonder if she would have reacted the same way with London Girl in NYC or Karen Brit Chick.

Instead of letting Mia (part Igbo, part Trini), hood-sexy, intelligent, styled and directed by me in my own home, breathe in her authenticity, Abiola overlaid it with Emily in Paris kitsch. At the time I thought it was a cute but pedestrian choice. The Abeille dress did have nautical stripes, and Mia was in a room with a Parisian patina. I let it slide. But after the way Abiola has behaved since reposting my work - and then scrubbing her feed of my input - I’m reading that scene differently. And that is exactly how microaggressions and gaslighting work.

Ayotunde of Jendaya cut through the noise: “Crediting isn’t controversial, it’s standard. Beyoncé still credits her stylists, Virgil did too. Refusing to give credit is ego, pure and simple: immaturity dressed up as principle.” He also clocked that my work had shifted the brand’s positioning exactly where they said they wanted to be: “she would have really come into a new era with you.” And finally, he reminded me what I already knew: the games you can play with impunity in Lagos don’t work here. Certainly not when you’re dealing with East London’s finest.

Lost in Translation

Respectability kill u dia.

I always chuckle when scrolling Naija blogs; the pigin so sharp and poetic you can literally see the insults land in 4K.

As Bobrisky told us, viral across TikTok and Snapchat: good girl no dey pay. Lagos knows it. Diaspora babies know it. Respectability won’t save you. You can be polite, deferential, palatable: it doesn’t matter. Apple Music, play The Story of O.J.

In my mother tongue Igbo, we say: O di kwa risky. It is risky. And that’s exactly what it is when you step into London, my city, and try to treat women like me the way you treat female staff back home: underpaid and disposable.

I’m not sure if Abiola realised that this aesthetic choice she made, had the effect of Cultural cleansing. For the “it’s not that deep brigade”, they probably will never see this as a rejection of working-class Black British femininity for a Parisian fantasy already mocked into irrelevance. But here’s the thing, in UK law when we talk about detrimental treatment and discrimination it’s not about the intent, the impact is what the courts are assessing.


On September 6th, still high from Vybz Kartel’s King of the Dancehall concert in London, I scrolled Instagram and landed on a Shaderoom post: Dionne Warwick, tweeting for TV recommendations as she recovered from surgery.

Her only request?

“Not Emily in Paris.” Eighty-eight thousand likes. Three thousand comments.

That’s cultural resonance. That’s the streets speaking. What Abiola thought was chic was already a punchline. Which gyal in Peckham, Hackney, Brixton, Tottenham is listening to Vanessa Paradis while getting ready for a night out? Nobody (Keith Sweat voice).

Nuh Boring Gyal

Like Mr Palmer, a.k.a. Vybz Kartel, Gen Z audiences don’t want boring girls. And here’s where I must put my finance bro cap on for a second: numbers don’t lie, check the scoreboard. As Mr Tom Ford himself recognised: sex sells. In marketing they call it “selling the sizzle”, yet Abiola was giving repressed. Not a dig: let me explain:

Tyla, April 2025. Ms Pretty Rockstar – mi nuh wan no BORING gyal.

On July 30th on a long district line train ride to scope out the pop-up venue in Fulham, I gave Abiola a quick tutorial on how to read the professional dashboard data on Instagram. She had just let her social media manager go, the fourth one in about 2 years or so and was managing the account solo – for now. Abiola’s eyes lit up when she saw that her page had over 100k views in the past 30 days. Hitherto, she had innocently focused on vanity metrics like follower count. I was happy that she was reassured, even though during my engagement with the brand, the finally crossed the 10k follower mark.

What pleased me even more was that four out of her top 10 most viewed posts featured me and my girl Mia. Proof in 4K that the strategy was working — stories outperforming feed posts, UGC resonating most.

And who ranked at number one? A mirror selfie of Akudo, the Igbo Australian founder of Shekudo, in Abiola’s dress and her own shoes. Abiola gave that post its flowers — spoke of Akudo with reverence. The loan-getter. The factory-runner. The one who didn’t play.

So, the question isn’t whether Abiola knows how to give credit. She does. It’s who gets crowned. And in this case, it was Akudo — light-skinned, mixed-race, exoticized in a Lagos imagination where proximity to Oyibo still buys prestige.

But let’s be clear: an Igbo woman was still number one. Full stop. Just like Chimamanda. Just like Genevieve. Just like Ogo, Yagazie, Mia. Just like me. We climb, we shine, we dominate. The issue is never talent. It’s whether our light gets reframed, diluted, or erased when it doesn’t fit the exotic fantasy.

Abiola thought she could erase my fingerprints and pocket my work, even after I salvaged an underperforming SKU she’d left languishing.

“She know I’m a beast and ain’t easy to tame.” 
— Gunna, Met Gala

I injected sexiness into a brand that was floundering, eating the dust of its more daring and switched-on peers like Kai Collective and Kilentar. Captured by my daughter Adaora on a night out in Rhodes Old Town, I was wearing the Abiola Olusola hot pink Arde skirt and the Killa Pink Adannae UK vest. An Avant Arte tote slung over my shoulder, as I strutted in slo-mo to Gunna’s Met Gala — “it’s easy to slip, don’t want you to fall.” Cos I’m the original agent provocateur, pretty serpent, and I slapped on an external link to Abiola’s website, not mine – captioned: “yo daddy wanna take me shopping.”


Courtesy of Adaora. Rhodes Old Town, July 2025. “I miss your old Instagram — bring it back.”  Legacy through my daughter’s lens. Adannae UK x Abiola Olusola Killa Pink fit #MamiWata, Nneka the Pretty Serpent reborn in rose-tinted dusk. Gunna on the soundtrack: “I need passports, we goin’ global — this bitch bad, fuck.”

This same skirt was dismissed as “giving fast fashion” by my Gen Z angel investor back in May. Same woman, three months later, saw my flyer for Abiola’s London pop-up (featuring Danel, the star of the Jamaica Green campaign) her tone flipped:

“Ohhh this looks good! I like the styling. It’s so fun!”

Nothing changed about the product styling per se: it was the same hot pink Arde skirt, same navy Liot top. The difference was the frame captured by my shooters Olu and Sonie plus my direction- the Adannae UK worldview. The bad-bitch stance. The East London air. The attitude that sells. They call it S.W.A.G over in LA. In London, I call it Movement Architecture.

But it still wasn’t clocking to Abiola: styling and cultural fluency aren’t cosmetic, they’re commercial. This is what “standing on business” looks like today: creating desirability and converting scepticism into sales.

This Sounds Off-Key

My easy-breezy iPhone image of Mia… should have been a cultural crescendo. Instead, Abiola muted it with Joe le Taxi.

Low-key, it does. Abiola came to me lamenting low follower count, disconnect with Gen Z audiences, unpaid invoices from US stockists. She came to the Black British woman to be on the frontline of her fight. And then turned around and inflicted the same harm -unpaid invoices, erasure of labour and refusal to credit- onto me.

History repeats. Black women have always held the frontline, from civil rights to BLM, while others reap the benefits.

My easy-breezy iPhone image of Mia - shot in my home, draped in inner city Black girl sex appeal but framed by Victorian period features and a striking canvas by South London artist Hamed Maiye - should have been a cultural crescendo. Instead, Abiola muted it with Joe le Taxi. In the summer of 2025.

The same summer Odeal’s London Summer was soundtracking real London feeds, shorthand for joy and style. Mia used it, I used it one glorious weekend at Greenwich Park with my daughter. My friend and fellow artist Olayemi used it too, the same Olayemi who modelled for Abiola in London as a personal favour. And Sonie, my sister in arms, put me on to Qendresa, the Albanian underground singer whose track 2 Much already lived on my campaign mood board alongside Olayemi’s neo-soul gem Mr Two Timer. It’s A LUNDUN thing: layered, polyphonic, raw.


Top of The Pops: Fashion Law student @anwarsdreadlock in the Liot top by Abiola Olusola. Shot by Grace Onyi in Hackney, East London. August, 2025.

Instead of leaning into the living, breathing soundscape, Abiola went off-track. She clearly wasn’t taking notes.

And this wasn’t the first time. When I was in Rhodes, they reposted my video — the hot pink Arde skirt, the Killa Pink vest, my daughter’s camera work, my strut scored to Gunna’s Met Gala. Evergreen content, it stayed in their top ten for weeks: proof. But when they reposted it, they muted the track. My chosen soundtrack was stripped away. And yet when they reposted my Mariah Carey moment, the song stayed.

“Music for runway is an art form.” 
— DJ Benji B

What do you get when you try to pass off erasure dressed as taste? Dior-lite cosplay. And the irony? Even Dior has been nicking guerrilla hacks from London inner city kids like Clint of Corteiz. Abiola thought she was climbing into the upper echelons of Euro Summer with the rest of the commercial content creators on IG. In reality, she fell into a Paradis of her own making: a parody, a paradigm stuck on repeat. A Nollywood farce, straight outta Osuofia in London. Joke ting

Digital Gentrification

“Once it was palm oil and groundnuts; today it’s UGC and IP. Different century, same blueprint.”

Abiola’s decision to archive, mute, and erase wasn’t just petty. It was part of a longer lineage of what choreographer and cultural commentator Jamaal Burkmar has called digital gentrification. Straight to jail, don’t pass Go, abeg shift!

When Jamaal e critiqued Chicken Shop Date, a show “that built its early identity on Black artists and therefore Black audiences,” he noted how it is now “remembered, repackaged and celebrated almost exclusively through white faces.” In his words, this is appropriation in real time.

The term stuck. One comment under Jamaal’s video summed it up: “digital gentrification has now entered the lexicon and I’m so thankful you called this out.” It amassed over 21,000 likes: proof that the culture recognises the theft, even when the industry pretends not to.

That’s what happened here. Abiola’s erasure of my fingerprints, her overlay of Vanessa Paradis on Mia’s raw UK baddie aesthetic, was a microcosm of that same logic: extract the culture, repackage it in Euro-palatable form, then erase the source. Once it was palm oil and groundnuts; today it’s UGC and IP. Different century, same blueprint.

On TikTok, user Sadell (@sadeona) calls this the oppressor complex. Her breakdown went viral because it resonated: Nigerians, she argued, internalise the habits of the oppressor; skipping queues, refusing reciprocity, treating disregard as a badge of superiority. “When you cut the line,” she said, “what you are really saying is you don’t respect them. And you don’t respect yourself.”

That’s exactly what Abiola did. She cut the line. She bypassed the women who gave her cultural capital, then tried to re-enter the room Euro-washed.

But London is not Lagos. In Lagos, low wages and disregard for women are normalised. In London, you chat shit? You chop knuckle, in the literal sense I mean dat.

Street Credibility

“Sometimes we haffi remind these lot: no immunity, no excuses.”

So, what does all this have to do with the vest top? Back in July, I directed a shoot designed to contextualise Abiola Olusola SS25 pieces in London and speak directly to diaspora women here in the UK. Boundary Street in East London was my pick: quiet, textured, quintessentially London.

Before the models, friends, and shooters arrived, Abiola and I ducked into Dishoom. Chicken ruby on the table, chai steaming, and both of us scrolling our phones for story songs. A cultural litmus test. I asked her what she was listening to. She showed me a playlist literally titled “The Best Era.” Britney Spears. Slave 4 U. Cute, MTV gloss. I aint mad at ya boo, but my preference packs more flava in ya ear.

My own Y2K soundtrack has always been Hoodriah remixes: The Roof with Mobb Deep, Thank God I Found You with Nas and Joe plus that NY heat. Dipset’ I’m Ready still on repeat til this day, for the pain. I use music as a salve, to self-sooth, to fantasise: Killa Cam’s pink range, pink furs and Motorola flips etched into memory. That aura gave me the audacity to flip pink into armour, whenever I was feelin blue.

“We on top like the Eiffel…You can’t be where I be, dog, you need a visa.” — Cam’ron, I’m Ready

The irony was already humming. Abiola wanted Britney sheen; I carried Harlem-esque grit. She chose Fulham for her pop-up: uptown spectacle. I chose East London: downtown substance.

For Harlem, Diplomatic Immunity meant sovereignty: clout as passport, street credibility as protection. But migration complicates immunity. What works in Lagos i.e. last-name privilege, seniority over skill, misogyny dressed as normalcy, doesn’t land in London.


And here’s the twist: in Lagos, it’s nepotism, patriarchy, and class that shield you or, what trainee psychotherapist and thoughtful TikTokker @29anjjo calls “Toxic Immunity”. Where a badly behaved friend acts with impunity and everyone else just sweeps it under the rug. Anjjo admits under this post that in Nigeria “we deffo have a culture of uplifting bad behaviour”. Alright cool.

Sometimes we haffi remind these lot: no immunity, no excuses. And that’s the irony Abiola missed: on my soil, the same laws never written with us in mind are the ones I can flip to hold her accountable. London is not Lagos. Here, your actions carry consequence: “you ain’t FCUK-ing with my city”, word to BunnaB. In obodo oyinbo, there’s the Equality Act. Contracts bite. As one comment under 29anjjo’s post said about the abusive character “Demilade never chop slap before” – 2,000 likes.

During lockdown the song I rinsed was Fela Kuti’s Beasts of No Nation. Twenty-seven minutes long: hypnotic horns, militant rhythm, and political commentary sharp as a blade. Fela spat the truth about leaders strutting with borrowed power, abusing their own people while performing sophistication for the West. That same dynamic lives on in fashion: colonial habits dressed up in organic linen and cotton blends. Optics over origin.

And here’s the thing: to say that out loud in Nigeria, in London, anywhere, is itself a privilege. Most people swallow it, smile through it, “don’t wash family linen in public.” Nigerian culture home and abroad is obsessed with silence: keep family matters inside, don’t embarrass the tribe. But what Fela did, what Buchi Emecheta did in Second Class Citizen and beyond: putting taboo truths into public record, takes more than talent. It takes mettle. It takes the willingness to be branded difficult, controversial, ungrateful.

That’s what Dipset called Diplomatic Immunity: the armour of clout that lets you say what others won’t. Fela had it. Buchi had it: the courage to put your head above the parapet, knowing the fire will come. So, I’m saying this with my full chest – tear my Killa Pink singlet if you must. Survival sometimes means speaking when the culture tells you to “Kip Kwyiet”.

Outro: Pantone 13-1520 Rose Quartz


The early internet had its own shade of pink. Girlboss Pink. Glossier Pink. Rose Quartz as Pantone called it in 2016, the press called it Millennial Pink and it was the colour of “empowerment” as branding, self-care as commodity, exploitation lacquered in gloss. Audrey Gelman at The Wing, Reformation’s founder, Leandra Medine of Man Repeller - all collapsed when the gap between optics and practice became undeniable.

“I’ve never been a girl’s girl. I’m Adaora’s Mum.”

The first word people reach for when describing me isn’t nice. And when you take food out of my child’s mouth, don’t hold me responsible for what comes next.

Ain’t nothing scary about a little spice.

Killa Pink isn’t candy-coated. It doesn’t hide the mess. It exposes it. It insists on credit, it demands receipts. This one is for my Top Set Tingz. The girlies who read, I want to spatially expand your horizons, so you don't get left behind in a class with scrubs. R.I.P. Left-Eye.

“I go talk am as I see am, I no go use any sugar cover am” — 9ice & 2Face

Street credibility is the only valid visa on my turf: Because culture doesn’t start in Paris, or corporate boardrooms or wealthy, gated Lagos compounds. It starts underground; on the London Underground to be exact.

Without cultural capital, you don’t look cosmopolitan.

You look moist.

Apple Music: Play “WGFT” — Gunna ft. Burna Boy

Gunna & Justin Bieber – WGFT. August 2025. Courtesy @gunna TikTok

Disclaimer

This article is a work of cultural commentary and personal reflection. It is written in good faith under the principles of honest opinion, fair comment, truth, and matters of public record, as recognised in UK defamation law. The perspectives expressed are mine alone, based on lived experience and observation, and are offered as a contribution to academic, sociological, and cultural debate in the public interest; particularly around issues such as gender discrimination, cultural appropriation, erasure, and inequities in fashion and culture.


Any references to individuals, brands, or companies are presented subjectively, as examples to illustrate broader patterns. They should not be read as definitive statements of fact about any person’s character, conduct, or business practices, save where such matters are already in the public domain.

Mentions of collaborators, associates, friends, or suppliers are for context only. They bear no responsibility for, nor are they implicated in, the disputes or commentary described. Any issues arising from this piece should be taken up directly with me and not with any third party. Vicarious liability does not apply.

This article is not intended to cause harm to reputation, nor should it be interpreted as defamatory. To the extent that errors or omissions exist, they are mine alone.