From Lagos with Love: The Making of Our Debut Collection

Every Marymia piece begins with a drive through Balogun market at 6am — fabric in one hand, a flat white in the other. We work with a women-led atelier in Lagos who have been cutting Adire for three generations.

Where It All Started

The idea for Marymia was born on a London winter evening in 2023. Our founder sat in her flat in Peckham, surrounded by fabric swatches sent from Lagos, sketching silhouettes that blended the flowing elegance of Yoruba dress with the clean lines she loved about London tailoring.

"I kept thinking about my grandmother," she recalls. "She would take a single piece of Adire cloth and turn it into something that made you feel like royalty. I wanted to bottle that feeling and share it with the world."

The Atelier

Our Lagos atelier sits on a quiet street in Surulere, inside a converted colonial-era building with high ceilings and louvre windows that catch the morning breeze. Twelve women work here, ranging in age from twenty-three to sixty-seven. Mama Titi, the eldest, has been dyeing Adire since she was nine years old.

"The indigo is alive," Mama Titi says, stirring a vat of dye that her mother taught her to prepare. "You cannot rush it. The cloth tells you when it is ready."

Each garment takes between three days and two weeks to complete, depending on the complexity of the pattern and dyeing technique. The Adire resist-dyeing process alone requires multiple rounds of waxing, tying, and soaking — each one building depth and character into the fabric.

From Lagos to London

Once complete, each piece is inspected, pressed, and carefully packed for its journey to our London studio. There, our design team conducts a final quality check, adds finishing touches like hand-stitched labels and care tags, and photographs each piece for the collection.

This dual-city workflow is intentional. We believe the best fashion emerges from a dialogue between cultures — the deep craft tradition of Lagos meeting the cosmopolitan eye of London. Neither dominates; both contribute.

What Makes It Different

In a world of fast fashion, we choose slowness. Our pieces are not seasonal trends — they are wardrobe companions designed to age beautifully, to be worn with confidence for decades. Every seam, every dye-line, every fold carries the fingerprint of the hands that made it.

When you wear Marymia, you wear a piece of Lagos. You wear the patience of a dye master, the precision of a cutter who has honed her craft over thirty years, and the quiet ambition of twelve women building something extraordinary in a Surulere workshop.

This is not just fashion. This is heritage, re-cut for the modern woman.