Amanda Rabor, an American-born daughter of a Nigerian immigrant, is reminding the world of the beauty of inclusion by creating culturally infused children fashion items.
With her popular fashion label Isossy Children, Rabor has managed to combine African and European fashion trends to create unique clothes that promote cultural diversity and pride in today’s culturally diverse society.
Speaking to Face2Face Africa, Rabor said she discovered her love for making clothes from a tender age, although she never took fashion as a serious profession until her late teen years, when she and her friends started participating in fashion shows in college.
Mixing African Fashion & European Trends
Rabor, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, remembers how as a child she wore both Western and Nigerian traditional clothes as a norm – a tradition that she has now passed on to her son.
Kids dressed by Isossy Children. Photo credit: The Twenty Ten Club
With the current global tension, Isossy Children wishes to design fashion items that will teach children to embrace global unity.
“We exist in a melting pot of diversity, and I want to capture that through my collections so that all children can wear them without prejudice,” Rabor says.
Rabor recently showcased her latest fashion collection, labeled “Passion and Play,” which she says is made up of two unique textiles that strengthen and promote the vision of global unity.
For example, the first textile is inspired by intertwined feathers — a symbol of the threads and ropes that bind us together — while the second outfit was designed as a complimentary graphic African textile and is a foundational piece.
A Global Brand
Established in 2010, Isossy Children has grown into a global brand and is featured in the top children magazines in the United States, U.K., and Europe.
Kids participating in Isossy Children’s fashion show. Photo credit: Naija Living in UK
Rabor says that even though she loves using Ankara textiles for her items, she has always longed to design her own textiles, a desire she has managed to achieve with her latest collections.
“Our current AW17/18 ‘Passion and Play’ collection infuses African [prints] with nature, and I created a foundational textile, which people are really loving so that’s really pleasing,” says Rabor.
“I’ve moved on as a designer, and my collections have taken the original idea, which was using African and Asian prints, and now I love modern heritage and creating my own unique prints that won’t be seen anywhere else but on Isossy.”
Rabor adds that Isossy Children is focused on empowering kids and touching lives.
At the moment, Rabor is focused on concentrating on the American and European markets due to the intricacies of the African market for children’s clothing, but for the future, she hopes to continue building on her brand’s foundations and carry forward its core beliefs to the world.
