David Avido in his workshop. Photo: Kibera Fashion Week
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David Avido: the Olympic estate tailor who dressed Bruno Mars and stayed in Kibera.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects' own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
David Ochieng, who works as David Avido, was born and raised in Kibera and still runs his workshop in Olympic. He taught himself to sew, then trained at the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts, where he finished top of his class. His label, Lookslike Avido, is known for bright, gender-neutral ankara and velvet pieces and for the conical basket hat, woven by his grandmother, that he wears everywhere.
He began by making outfits for his own dance crew. His first celebrity client came in 2017, when the reggae singer Don Carlos wore one of his shirts at a Nairobi concert. The list since then includes Chronixx, Bruno Mars, Ty Dolla $ign, Chris Martin, Romain Virgo, Jah Cure, Ce'cile, Alaine and Buju Banton.
Berlin, Vogue, Beyoncé
He showed at Berlin Fashion Week in 2019. Vogue Italia ran a multimedia feature on him in February 2020, and in August 2020 he was credited among the African designers on the website of Beyoncé's Black Is King. Al Jazeera made a short film about him, Colours Are Alive Here, released in January 2022. During the pandemic his workshop made thousands of free masks for Kibera residents.
Twenty per cent
The Avido Foundation takes 20 per cent of every sale. It trains deaf women and young mothers, makes school uniforms and pays school fees. Some of its trainees now work at Sandstorm in Karen. In 2022 he founded Kibera Fashion Week, which KNN profiles separately.
"Kibera is full of style," he told AFP in 2023. Years earlier he put it another way to Capital FM: "I won't move out of Kibera no matter how much money I make."
Sources: AFP via Malay Mail, 15 Oct 2023; The Standard, 22 Jun 2024; Capital FM, 18 Mar 2019; Capital FM, 9 Feb 2020; Capital FM, 4 Aug 2020; Africanews, 23 Jan 2023; Al Jazeera, 4 Jan 2022.
That was a Kibra News Network report, read by an A I voice.
Kibera Creatives is a KNN series on the artists, designers and performers who built their names from Kibera. Profiles are compiled from published reports and the subjects’ own public pages; sources are listed at the end. Spotted an error? Write to news@kibranewsnetwork.co.ke.
David Ochieng, who works as David Avido, was born and raised in Kibera and still runs his workshop in Olympic. He taught himself to sew, then trained at the Buruburu Institute of Fine Arts, where he finished top of his class. His label, Lookslike Avido, is known for bright, gender-neutral ankara and velvet pieces and for the conical basket hat, woven by his grandmother, that he wears everywhere.
He began by making outfits for his own dance crew. His first celebrity client came in 2017, when the reggae singer Don Carlos wore one of his shirts at a Nairobi concert. The list since then includes Chronixx, Bruno Mars, Ty Dolla $ign, Chris Martin, Romain Virgo, Jah Cure, Ce’cile, Alaine and Buju Banton.
Berlin, Vogue, Beyoncé
He showed at Berlin Fashion Week in 2019. Vogue Italia ran a multimedia feature on him in February 2020, and in August 2020 he was credited among the African designers on the website of Beyoncé’s Black Is King. Al Jazeera made a short film about him, Colours Are Alive Here, released in January 2022. During the pandemic his workshop made thousands of free masks for Kibera residents.
Twenty per cent
The Avido Foundation takes 20 per cent of every sale. It trains deaf women and young mothers, makes school uniforms and pays school fees. Some of its trainees now work at Sandstorm in Karen. In 2022 he founded Kibera Fashion Week, which KNN profiles separately.
“Kibera is full of style,” he told AFP in 2023. Years earlier he put it another way to Capital FM: “I won’t move out of Kibera no matter how much money I make.”
KNN Newsroom is the staff byline for stories written, rewritten and edited at the Kibra News Network desk. Where a story credits an outside outlet, the original source is linked at the foot of the piece.
