The Founder’s Story
By Ann-Aniedi Asikpo
It started on the floor
Not in a studio. Not in a classroom. On the floor. I grew up in Nigeria watching a woman lay fabric across the ground and cut patterns from memory. No template. No measuring tape most of the time. Just her hands, her eyes, and decades of knowledge held in her body. She could look at a length of Ankara and tell you exactly how many garments it would yield, where the pattern would fall on each seam, and which cut would honour the cloth rather than waste it. She did not call herself a designer. She would have found the word vaguely amusing. She was simply a woman who knew what fabric was for. I was captivated. By the time I was a teenager, I was making dresses, altering garments, fashioning shoes for my child not as a career ambition, but because working with African fabric was how I expressed myself. It was, I understand now, a language I was born speaking.
The decision to stop — and why
I made clothes for years. Then I made a deliberate decision to stop. Not because I had fallen out of love with fabric. But because I could see that the stories of African textiles their history, their meaning, their cultural intelligence , were being lost in the translation to global fashion. Ankara was being sold as “African print.” Kente was becoming a pattern. Bogolan was being called “mudcloth” without any acknowledgement of the Bambara people of Mali who created it. I wanted to do something about that. And to do it properly, I needed new tools. I moved to the United Kingdom and enrolled in an MA in Multimedia Public Relations at Teesside University. For two years, I suspended the making and studied the telling , digital platforms, brand strategy, content creation, promotional culture, narrative inquiry, cultural communications. It was not an easy transition. A new country, a new academic environment, the pressure of postgraduate study, the distance from everything familiar. But the discipline of it , the learning of how stories are constructed, distributed, and received gave me something I did not have before: the strategic language to match the cultural knowledge I had carried all my life.
Durham Cathedral and what I learned
For my MA final project, I designed a multimedia public relations campaign for Durham Cathedral , one of England’s most historic religious sites. The brief was challenging: attract 18 to 24-year-olds to an institution that had never successfully spoken their language. The platform I chose was TikTok. The budget was zero. The result was over 1,800 organic views, 3,977 Facebook impressions, and genuine engagement from a demographic the Cathedral had never previously reached. What I learned from that project has shaped everything since: the gap between an institution and its potential audience is almost never about the institution’s relevance. It is about the language being used to communicate it. Durham Cathedral had 1,000 years of extraordinary human stories inside it. Young people were not uninterested in those stories. They simply had never been told them in a way that respected both the story and the audience. I carry that lesson directly into my work with African textile heritage. The fabrics are extraordinary. The stories are compelling. The audiences , African diaspora communities, global fashion brands, cultural organisations, anyone who wears or admires these textiles are hungry for them. What has been missing is a narrator who understands both the heritage and the medium.
Coming back to the fabric
I completed my MA in 2024. A registered member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (MCIPR). And then after three years away from making , I came back to the cloth. But this time, with the full set of tools. In January 2026, I registered Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Studio in the United Kingdom. A studio built on the belief that African textiles deserve to be decoded, credited, and communicated to global audiences with the accuracy, depth, and cultural respect they have always earned and rarely received. I am based in Stockton-on-Tees, North East England. I am building relationships with cultural organisations locally, nationally, and internationally. I am exhibiting work, writing publicly, and speaking wherever there are ears willing to learn what African fabric has always been trying to say. I am also, once again, making things with my hands. And the floor, where it all began, is still the best place to lay out cloth.
What drives me
I have always loved to help people. I have spent years as a volunteer , in Nigeria with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, supporting the less privileged; in the UK with community organisations including FareShare Middlesbrough and card-making workshops for people who needed a reason to smile. That impulse to put smiles on faces, to make something meaningful for someone else runs through everything I do professionally as well. Decoding Africa’s textile heritage is not an academic exercise for me. It is a love letter to the continent that made me. To the woman on the floor with the fabric. To every African woman who has stood in a market, chosen a length of cloth, and communicated something to the world that the world did not yet have words for. I am building Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Studio to give those communications the global platform they deserve. One fabric. One story. One audience at a time.
Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Founder, Ann-Aniedi Asikpo Studio MCIPR · MA Multimedia Public Relations, Teesside University Stockton-on-Tees, North East England #Decode Africa. #Weave your story. 🧡