When Fisayo Longe posted a picture of herself wearing a white sundress on TikTok, it quickly amassed 100,000 views, as people pleaded with her to tell them where it was from. Several followers tried to reverse image search it. Alas, it was not yet for sale.
Thirty-two year old Longe tends to test the waters by soft-launching the designs for her brand Kai Collective on social, but even she was surprised by the response to this dress. Her Instagram post about the gown has since garnered 19,000 likes. Named Adesuwa, Longe, a sensible small business owner, had initially only ordered 200 units. “From the response, I knew that was not going to be enough,” she says over Zoom. To help get a sense of numbers, Kai Collective released the option to pre-order. Four thousand people joined the waitlist. One thousand people immediately purchased it.
“It was a dress to fit every woman and every situation,” Longe explains of its appeal. With its cinched and ruched waist, puffy hips, long length and simple white hue, it’s both minimalist and maximalist, modest yet sexy. “It makes for a great canvas,” she adds of the flattering piece that works just as well for walks in the park as it does for weddings. Expect it to be everywhere now that summer has arrived in the UK.
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Longe, it turns out, went through five iterations, initially designing the dress in a black, pink and red colourway until her team decided to eliminate colour altogether and make it in white cotton. The frenetic response has led them to extend the size range from XS to 5XL, and create a shorter black version, with more colourways to come. “It might outsell Gaia by the looks of it,” she says, referring to the sell-out kaleidoscopic marbled dress that first put her brand on the map in 2020, thanks to Saweetie and Adwoa Aboah.
Kai Collective began as “my love letter to women,” she explains. “Artistically, there’s so much inspiration that I take from traditional Nigerian dressing. We’re always in our best. There is no ‘I don’t want to be overdressed.’ Everyone is overdressed… Growing up in Lagos is essentially overload. There’s so much happening and there’s so many different colours, on the roads, in the markets, so I absorbed so much from that.”
All of this fed into her vision to create “main character clothing.” For her, she also sees Kai Collective as a way to fight the patriarchal society she saw around her growing up. “I have always wanted to create something to make women feel like their most confident selves – not feel like they have to dim themselves down or stay away from the limelight, but take up space,” she says. When people wear her designs, they inevitably experience “the Kai effect,” she smiles. “You’re gonna get compliments. It’s loud – people notice.”
Entrepreneurial since secondary school, she started to sell her friends’ old clothes online after moving to London at the age of 15. “I always had more expensive taste than money,” recalls Longe. “I wanted all the designer stuff, so I used to buy it on eBay.” While first working as an accountant, the lover of fabric would source materials on her travels and make her own pieces, such as an oversized jacket with exaggerated shoulders, a blue chiffon top with dramatic sleeves, and a printed bandeau and skirt set. Noticing how many people would stop to ask where she’d bought them, her mogul instinct kicked in.
And so, in 2016, Kai Collective was born. Longe had anticipated instant success, but it took four rocky years for it to really find its feet. Longe feels the same about her own style. While her Instagram boasts the most covetable collection of clothes – including Issey Miyake and Alaïa, which she mixes with Kai Collective – she really honed her love of shapes and prints in 2020. “My personal style is a celebration of the way I see the world,” she says, before dishing out her best fashion advice: “Don’t be afraid of colour or print. Let your imagination run wild and dress based on how you feel, or the woman you want to be. And have fun! Be confident in anything you wear.”
