‘That was our language as black kids. That was our street power’

Very few people can say that as a child, they knew exactly what they’d grow up to be. But Andrew Ibi is one of them.

Born in 1975 in the small village of Dulwich in South London, Andrew has always possessed a needle-keen eye for fashion. At just eight years old, he marched into school wearing his pride and joy: a brand new pair of Nike Bruins, already customised by his own artistic flair. With a gold pen he’d gilded the bright blue Nike tick, careful not to colour outside the lines. Parading around the corridors the next day, he insisted he was wearing rare “limited edition American imports”, much to his classmates’ envy. Of course, back then all the best things came from America: breakdancing, James Brown, and BMXs.

Nowadays, Andrew has settled down as the head of fashion at Liverpool John Moores University, having already lived a life most people would surely envy: he ran his own fashion label, was featured in global magazines and is now one of the most well regarded black academics in the country. But despite his accolades and achievements taking him as far as New York and Canada, something about Liverpool’s spirit of individuality and anti-authority has drawn him here.

Scousers “don't really toe the line,” he tells me over a pint in the Pen Factory on a warm Thursday afternoon. “They operate outside of what you're supposed to do and don't really care for rules.” 

John Moores — and Liverpool — affords Andrew an edge he could not easily find elsewhere. “If you're running a programme in like, Bath, it's not necessarily going to be edgy and gritty,” he notes. “Whereas if you're running a programme [in Liverpool], you can be really political and argumentative and really like, ‘No, we're not putting up with that’.”

Take Nadia Atique, for example. A designer of Yemeni heritage, she was one of his first students back in 2017 when he began working at the university. According to Andrew, her initial project — while still impressive — was “a little turgid”, and while it reflected her culturally “it didn’t represent her present”. 

“She came to me and she was doing this work, but said to me ‘You know, I love football and I love Liverpool’. I told her, ‘Well, that is what your clothes should be’.” Within weeks she’d transformed her project. Her final show opened with theatrical aplomb; red flares blazing from a university roof terrace, while women in both headscarfs and football gear strutted across a catwalk. The collection was so groundbreaking Nadia appeared on both Match of the Day and French television to talk about her designs, and British Vogue featured her that same year.

This ability to merge cultures and ideas without fear of ridicule or failure is what Andrew thinks Liverpool does best: that entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself default operating system of the scouser, meshed idiosyncratically with the imposing high glamour that women here often deploy.

Long before making his mark on Liverpool, he’d been inspired as a child by his older brother Jason’s fearless sense of style, and inherited his love of designer gear. Donning everything from Comme de Garçons to Joe Casely-Hayford, the duo rocked the streets of Dulwich, often wearing flashy new trainers paid for once a year by their parents. 

Andrew never quite understood his parents’ willingness to invest in such sartorial splendour for their children. They didn’t have a lot of money growing up, though his father — a tall, studious man from Nigeria — was “a really stylish guy”, often wearing wrappers, colourful shirts, hats and beads. “My mum and dad were a very cool couple in their time,” he says. “They probably understood that and we were allowed this ability to express ourselves through clothing.”

This passion for self expression evolved into a desire to make his own clothes. By the time he had turned 13, Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table, entranced by Jason — now a student at London College of Fashion — chopping up fabric. Before long, the scissors were in his own hands. The brothers began a business — small, informal, but bespoke — crafting custom jackets, unique shirts and specialised trousers for their friends in the neighbourhood. “During that period of time it was all about having style,” Andrew explains. “In a way, that was our language as black kids. That was our street power.”

Perhaps this is why the pair found so much success in selling their handmade garments. Often charging 60 or 70 quid an item, the brothers became the talk of the town, and when Andrew turned 16 he too enrolled at the London College of Fashion to follow in Jason’s footsteps. Here, he learnt the skills needed to perfect his trade. “My focus became making the most extraordinary things without a stitch out of place,” he says. Andrew and his friends even coined a phrase to tease each other when mistakes were made — “we’d call it a Pablo,” he laughs. A Pablo, or a Pablo Picasso, was a term they used to “pull each other up” if a stitch wasn’t perfectly aligned. “A Pablo, that's not good when you're stitching a really neat garment — you don't need cubism!”

Over the next few years he continued to thrive in his education, enrolling at the University of Middlesex to study fashion design and winning Graduate of the Year in 1996. “That award back then was so prestigious,” he says, and for weeks afterwards magazines and newspapers petitioned him for interviews and photo spreads.

With all this success under his no doubt custom-made belt, you might expect Andrew had no trouble finding work after university. But after months of applications, a job in the UK still eluded him. “I was really frustrated, and at the time I didn’t really put it down to race,” he explains. “I’d been in all these magazines and won awards — it was only years later I did the maths on it and worked out that actually there was something intrinsically wrong [with the fashion world].”