Long earlier than she ever sketched a T-shirt, Folajogun Akinlami was dressing a wound in how society sees disabled girls. A polio survivor with a bodily impairment affecting her proper leg, the broadcaster behind Beyond Challenges and founder of the Differently Abled Foundation has spent her profession making area the place there was none. It began in a radio studio in Ondo State. Then it turned a TV present, a basis, a fellowship in Wisconsin, three books, two movies and a grasp’s diploma in Nottingham. MARY NNAH examines how Nottingham-based Nigerian broadcaster Folajogun Akinlami is bringing her lifelong work on illustration, self-worth and belonging to a extra private area, the wardrobe, via her new inclusive model Let Love Lead, a line of T-shirts and activewear for each physique
On air, on the web page and on display, Folajogun Akinlami has spent years asking how visibility feels. With Let Love Lead, her new assortment of T-shirts and inclusive activewear for each physique, she is asking it the place it issues most, within the becoming room.
The Nottingham-based Nigerian broadcaster, writer and incapacity advocate is popping visibility into one thing you’ll be able to put on.
For Folajogun Akinlami, vogue was by no means going to be nearly cloth. To this finish, Akinlami, who writes underneath the title Vickie Banks, is making ready to launch Let Love Lead, a new clothes assortment of T-shirts and activewear that extends a artistic profession dedicated to inclusion, illustration, self-worth and belonging.
“I have spent my whole career talking about inclusion,” Akinlami says. “Let Love Lead is me deciding that inclusion also has to be something you can put on in the morning. It has to live in your wardrobe”, she famous.
It is a pure subsequent step. For years, Akinlami has explored the identical questions via broadcasting, books, music, movie and the Differently Abled Foundation. Let Love Lead brings that dialog into a extra intimate, on a regular basis area: how we costume and the way we permit ourselves to be seen.
Wearing Visibility
A polio survivor with a bodily impairment affecting her proper leg, Akinlami has drawn on her personal lived expertise to query how disabled individuals are seen and whose lives obtain consideration. Much of her artistic work has addressed the area accessible to disabled girls in public life, in relationships and in tradition.
Let Love Lead takes that concern into the on a regular basis expertise of dressing and being seen.
“I know what it feels like to walk into a shop and not see yourself anywhere,” Akinlami says. “Not on the model, not on the poster, not within the sizes. Let Love Lead began from that wound, she mentioned.
The assortment’s launch marketing campaign says all of it with out saying an excessive amount of. Women of totally different ages and physique shapes seem in coordinated activewear in a number of colors, shifting, laughing, modelling collectively. Its message – inclusive activewear for each physique – locations illustration on the very centre of the model’s introduction.
“We did not cast models; we cast real life. Different ages, different bodies, different stories. Because every body deserves activewear, not just some bodies,”, she defined.
The ambition is deliberate: to make room for individuals who could not recognise themselves in standard vogue promoting and to encourage confidence in how they current themselves.
In a market that usually tells girls to shrink, Let Love Lead invitations them to belong.
A History of Being Heard
That ambition has a historical past that lengthy predates the clothes rail. Long earlier than the launch, Akinlami was a acquainted voice and face in Nigerian tv and radio. Her profession contains presenting and producing leisure programmes on the Ondo State Radiovision Corporation and Orange FM. At OSRC, she additionally served as Head of the Entertainment Unit and Secretary of the Programmes Department, contributing to programme opinions and broadcast-content requirements.
Working throughout each leisure and public-interest programming gave her a uncommon ability: reaching audiences via acquainted cultural types whereas carrying a deeper message.
That was evident in her disability-focused programme Beyond Challenges, which introduced the achievements and experiences of individuals with disabilities into public dialogue. Rather than treating incapacity as the entire of a particular person’s id, the programme made area for careers, ambitions and participation in society.
Her present platform, Folajogun Akinlami TV, continues that work via digital broadcasting and movie. Beyond and Above Challenges develops her long-standing curiosity within the lives and achievements of individuals navigating limitations, whereas Hanging with Diasporans brings conversations about Nigerian and diaspora experiences to on-line audiences. Together, these programmes present a setting for discussions that join particular person experiences with wider social questions.
Advocacy Beyond The Screen
In 2018, Akinlami established the Differently Abled Foundation in Nigeria. The organisation brings a group dimension to the considerations explored in her artistic work, advocating inclusion and alternatives for individuals with disabilities.
The relationship between her broadcasting and basis work is direct: public storytelling can draw consideration to exclusion, whereas group advocacy addresses how individuals expertise it past the display.
“The Foundation taught me that advocacy cannot stay on screen. It has to touch lives on the ground,” Akinlami famous.
Her worldwide expertise deepened that connection. In 2019, she was chosen as a Mandela Washington Fellow on the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During that interval, she volunteered at Gigi’s Playhouse, a Down syndrome achievement centre.
Her expertise there turned the topic of Fola and Haley: A Friendship Story, revealed by Wisconsin Life in January 2020 and credited to Akinlami and producer Karl Christenson. The contribution explored friendship and self-perception via her reference to a younger participant on the centre.
Writing Her Own Life
The identical willingness to look at private expertise runs via her writing. Her guide Stolen Paradise explores life, love and incapacity; themes that additionally featured in a dialogue documented within the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 4W Initiative 2020 progress report.
Writing as Vickie Banks, Akinlami later developed her autobiographical work in Phoenix: A Journey of Rebirth and Resilience, returning to questions of id, relationships, and rebuilding a life.
“I write because disabled women are rarely allowed to tell their own love stories, their own motherhood stories. I had to write mine, so others could know they can own theirs too”, Akinlami mentioned.
Her subsequent manuscript, The Child I Chose, carries that autobiographical journey into motherhood. Across these works, the connecting topic is constant: a girl’s proper to explain her personal life in its complexity.
Disability sits alongside intimacy, disappointment, hope and household, giving readers a fuller account of experiences that public dialogue can too simply scale back to a single label.
From Soundtrack to Screen
Music and movie kind one other half of that artistic historical past. Akinlami’s work contains Ariwo Oja, a music venture linked together with her display work. She co-produced Ariwo Oja Parts 1 and a pair of and contributed the soundtrack.
Those credit introduced her musical and manufacturing work collectively, giving her one other solution to attain audiences via common leisure. Her later executive-producer credit embrace Pendulum and Ile Binukonu, launched via her growing movie platform in 2026.
Enough is a additional executive-producer venture awaiting launch. The movies broaden her portfolio past disability-focused programming, and that broadening is itself a assertion: her participation in leisure additionally displays the place she claims for disabled creatives as producers of a vary of tales, not only one variety of story.
Her educational work has examined associated questions. She accomplished a grasp’s diploma in Youth Work and Leadership Practice at Nottingham Trent University, researching the self-perception of girls residing with bodily disabilities in Nigeria. That topic connects intently with the problems of visibility and id operating via her books, broadcasting and now, her clothes marketing campaign.
Why Clothes Matter
Let Love Lead provides these long-held considerations a industrial expression.
“For me, this is not a fashion brand; it is a statement. That love should lead how we see ourselves, how we design, how we include. If we let love lead, we will make room for everybody,” Akinlami mentioned additional.
Clothing is private, however the pictures used to promote it additionally talk highly effective assumptions about who belongs.
By selecting inclusive illustration as the place to begin for the model, Akinlami brings her advocacy into sensible selections about how a assortment is offered and who’s invited to see themselves carrying it.
The new line additionally marks a additional stage in her work between Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Her profession has moved from regional broadcasting to group advocacy, worldwide trade, publishing and on-line manufacturing. The codecs have modified, whereas her curiosity in individuals’s capacity to take part and outline themselves has remained seen.
As she prepares to introduce Let Love Lead, the connection between the gathering and her earlier work provides the launch its wider context. The clothes belongs to an ongoing artistic apply wherein illustration is a sensible query: whose story is advised, whose picture is proven, and who has the chance to create.
For Folajogun Akinlami, the subsequent expression of that work will probably be one thing individuals can put on – inclusive activewear for each physique, made to let love lead.
