The Working Wardrobe: Aindrea Emelife

Named in 2022 as one of PORTER’s six incredible women shaking up the art world, Aindrea Emelife’s star shines just as brightly today, but, admittedly, she remains hopeful a time will come where we don’t need to celebrate such milestones. “I’m very conscious of how being a woman in the art world is revolutionary,” says Emelife. “I’m looking forward to a real, equitable art world,” she explains, before adding, “That being said, I think it’s incredibly meaningful to be someone who future generations can see and know that it’s possible. When you look around and see others like you doing something, it allows you to dream.”

You will need to dream big if you’re looking to follow in this Nigerian-British changemaker’s footsteps, who is proving exactly what’s possible as a young Black female curator. Following the lauded Black Venus exhibition at London’s Somerset House, which brought together the work of 18 Black women and non-binary artists to explore the othering, fetishization and reclamation of narratives around Black femininity, Emelife was announced as the curator of Nigeria’s national pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. “It’s occupying my full attention because representing a nation is a big, big task, and I’m really looking forward to it,” she shares.

Digging a little deeper into how Emelife began carving her unique path, it turns out that it all began with a fashion blog created in her early teens, which led to internships on the Sunday Times Style desk and the independent magazine Tank, where she explored how the worlds of fashion and art collide. A lightbulb moment happened at Tank when she was handed an art issue to work on, influenced by her love of show-hopping and spending hours upon hours at the National Portrait Gallery. Though fashion was never far from her mind, art took over as a career focus, her aim being to discover more visual ways to tell stories using her instinctive eye and studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art. “What I found most interesting when I was looking at fashion is how it related to other art forms, and how collections had been inspired by other realms of creativity,” she reveals. “Designers are weaving stories with what might otherwise be seen as something quite perfunctory, and I think it’s these stories that we all tell – as designers, journalist and curators – that are so important.”

Storytelling doesn’t stop at work for Emelife, who admits to viewing clothes as a way to carve out an identity and present her own narrative. Read on to discover her thoughts on personal style and her tips for curating a powerful, well-loved wardrobe.

“Bold colors look good on me, especially white and red or bright pink, navy, soft powder-blues and so on, and a pale lemon yellow is also really nice. At 29, I am at a weird in-between age where I feel like I should be trying to, not ‘dress like a grown-up’, because there’s no such thing, but perhaps dress a little differently. I cling on to fanciful, girly vibes, but I now try to mix it with something strong or serious. Mixing pretty things with something like a chunky knee boot or a corporate-girl blazer creates a juxtaposition that almost doesn’t make sense. I am quite conscious about representation and which pieces make sense for what – but without being too rigid, because I know this world tries to put people in boxes. I believe there’s something important about resisting those schemes.”

“I love adding an unexpected edge to my outfits, and I’m kind of into throwing in a bit of latex or something patent. These fabrics really rub against the girly-girl aesthetic that I otherwise go for, and it’s about finding these different corners of my personality and representing them. It’s also about embracing a different time in my life, when I was much younger and loved going out in Soho – I’m not saying I don’t go out now, but much less so. It’s nice to have these little ‘memory moments’ in the way that we dress. I see dressing almost as visiting your memories or the past, and I think that’s why I like to keep hold of certain things.”

“Art influences how I dress and approach color quite organically, becoming more obvious depending on what I’m working on. At the moment, I’m doing a lot of work with African art and I’m finding myself drawn to khaki greens and natural, sand colors. Because I’m spending much more time in Nigeria, I feel like the things I’m excited by are blending, or merging, into more natural color scopes. This even happened with one of the outfits I wore for this shoot – a black knitted top by Wardrobe.NYC and a Dries Van Noten skirt that reminded me of raffia. When I was wearing it, I was thinking it was the sort of thing I’d wear when I’m in Nigeria. As a curator, you’re very visual and you pay a lot of attention to the way things look. It’s about what story you’re trying to tell, and I definitely apply some of the same tools I use in my job into curating myself.”

“Honestly, I have only just started to really think about my skincare regime, but a beauty signature is something I have had for a long time. It’s a cat-eye eyeliner flick, and this has been the case ever since I was a young girl. I tend to wear it with a deep plum or oxblood eyeshadow that is typically quite smudgy, because I don’t really know how to apply eyeshadow very well – so I just made smudginess my thing. I will always have a dark lip gloss on, too. Even though I love wearing something girly, I do have quite a grungy makeup style. It’s a fun contrast.”