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Foday Dumbuya, who founded Labrum, has been making waves in the United Kingdom and back home. He was born in Sierra Leone, spent his formative years in Cyprus and moved to London when he was 12.
Foday is a Menswear designer and Creative Director whose practice exists between the intersection of Fashion, Culture and Art.
Having graduated from Nottingham Trent University, he went on to work for DKNY and Nike before launching his brand LABRUM London in 2015.
After a stint at LCF and then learning pattern cutting, Foday’s desire to master the craft of design took him on a journey of exploration where he learned many different ways to develop and create garments.
He has incorporated techniques handed down generation by generation for centuries into the LABRUM collections, fusing some traditional silhouettes such as the agbada shirt with classic British tailoring to create styles that are signature to Labrum and totally unique to the brand.
In May 2023, he received the Queen Elizbeth 11 Award for British Design, following in the footsteps of Saul Nash and Richard Quinn. It was presented by King Charles, with soccer legend David Beckham present.
Meanwhile, In September 2023, Sierra Leonean rapper Rapper Drizilik was in London to attend the Fashion extravaganza “London Fashion week” in support of Labrum.
Benjamin Menelik George had started working with the brand the previous year, given a huge similarity between his style of dress and that of the designs of the brand.
Dumbuya’s origins were much more modest. Largely self-taught, he studied information systems and design before going on to do a year at the London College of Fashion. According to Dumbuya, he learned mostly from YouTube and took only one-on-one courses regarding specific things he wanted to learn. “It was just trial and error,” he says.
Labrum loosely means “having an edge” in Latin. For Dumbuya, that edge lies in his storytelling about migration and the Black experience around the world
