At Milan Design Week, Byredo Celebrated Its Dozie Kanu Collaboration With a Globe-Trotting Dinner

Ben Gorham has always had a unique starting point for his fragrances: memories. Upon creating his first perfumes for Byredo all the way back in 2006, Gorham’s emotionally intuitive, storyteller’s approach to scent-making—think aromas evoking everything from antique leather books to nurses during wartime—quickly became his calling card, leading to Byredo’s growth from a cult brand to a genuine disruptor within the beauty world.

Take Bal d’Afrique, the cult fragrance that Gorham first launched in 2009. Inspired by the diaries from his father’s travels across Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya, the scent is less a literal interpretation of the sensorial experience of visiting these countries than a broader evocation of how memories of a place are refracted through generations—though its notes of buchu and African marigolds do, however subtly, nod to the continent’s lush flora. 

All this led Gorham to enlist the artist Dozie Kanu to produce one of the brand’s most ambitious projects yet: a large-scale, site-specific installation during the events orbiting the Salone del Mobile in Milan. “We’ve known each other for a while through friends, and I believe Dozie is one of the most talented designers of his generation,” says Gorham. “I wanted to push him to some extent where he had not been yet.” With the fragrance as a loose starting point, Gorham gave Kanu carte blanche to interpret it any which way he chose. By coincidence or fate, Kanu ended up embracing Gorham’s ode to tracing one’s family lineage—whether backwards through the generations, or outwards across the diaspora—in his own, distinctive way. 

To enter the airy, light-filled space on Via Maiocchi, visitors first had to pass through a corridor lined with photographs. Laid out in small plastic frames, the images assembled by Kanu in collaboration with Adjoa Armah’s Saman Archive—all printed from photographic negatives the London-based Armah had sourced from across Ghana—spanned everything from snapshots of flamboyantly dressed couples and families walking the streets of Accra, to intimate windows into nightclubs and festivals from across the decades. All were gently faded, or speckled with a yellowing patina, nodding to their excavation from a previously forgotten past, now brought back to life in exuberant style. (With Gorham’s Indian-Swedish background and Kanu’s experience growing up with Nigerian immigrant parents in Houston, they note bonding over feeling “between two worlds.”)

Within the central hall, a central structure of aluminum and steel was broken up with enormous panels of wicker coated in a waxy layer of deep, earthy red paint, trimmed across the top with kitschy glass bricks. Weave your way through the space, and a series of increasingly intriguing, off-kilter details reveal themselves: a blood-red stool with bulbous feet topped with leather, strings flying off it like streamers; photographs captured by Kanu himself on trips to Nigeria and Senegal, hung as diptychs in slick colored frames that held a touch of the uncanny; and perhaps most striking of all, a series of floor lamps made from topsy-turvy combinations of metal washing machine parts, percussion instruments, and kaleidoscopic colored gels. 

For Kanu, the process of making the installation—and of folding all of these disparate elements into a cohesive whole—became deeply personal, even serving as a homecoming of sorts. “To do the project, I had to reconnect to the continent,” Kanu says. “It had been more than five years since my last trip to Africa. So, I took the chance to go back and to blend into it again. I went to Dakar and visited a lot of places, nightclubs, houses, restaurants—where people do live, where people do go. It was key for me to get a sense and a vibe of what was going on there now.”

Despite their clear synchronicity as creatives, it was the sense of freedom that gave the project true lift-off, Kanu and Gorham explain. The latter notes he hoped to be as surprised as any visitor when he first visited the space on a balmy spring afternoon in Milan last week. “I had no idea what Dozie would come up with,” says Gorham. “So when I stepped into the space and saw the result, it was mind-blowing for me. Dozie seized the opportunity to create a structure and a narrative that is actually giving a reflection to every visitor—his profound work adds a lot to the story of Bal d’Afrique.” For Kanu, being able to work on a larger-scale project without commercial pressures became a kind of creative tonic. “I really felt that I had the privilege to express myself, to maximize my potential,” he adds. “Ben really pushed me to my limits and allowed me to do something I thought I would never be capable of.”

The story was continued on Thursday night, when the installation served as the backdrop for an event the pair hosted, which had all the warmth and conviviality—appropriately for both the spirit of Kanu’s work and the philosophy of Byredo more broadly—of a family reunion. Guests including Francesco Risso, Shayne Oliver, Ncuti Gatwa, Edward Buchanan, Jessica Joffe, Tamu McPherson, and Camilla and Giulia Venturini of Medea took in the installation illuminated by soft uplighting before sitting down to enjoy a meal prepared by Congolese chef Dieuveil Malonga, a pioneer of Afro-fusion cuisine whose globe-trotting culinary spirit was channeled into dishes from pulpo grilled in Swahili spices to fried plantain with Ghanaian shito “like grandma makes,” in Malonga’s words. “The night was all about celebrating memories, and sharing that heritage to a broader audience,” Kanu adds. 

Afterwards, the eclectic crew made their way a few blocks over to Love Bar, a cult nightlife spot near Porta Venezia where spritzes and gin and tonics were served, and more adventurous guests headed to the subterranean dance floor where thumping house music invited anyone who cared to (and there were plenty who cared to by this point in the week) to party late into the night. 

For Gorham, however, the night served not as a punctuation mark ending his collaboration with Kanu, but instead, he hopes, the start of something even bigger. “We need to speak about it together and see what will be the next steps,” Gorham says. “But this is definitely a work that I feel can be seen and explored on a broader level.”