This article appeared in our fall/winter 2025 issue that is on stands now. Subscribe to the magazine here.
For many kids, hair is a playground: a place for self-expression and experimentation. For me, it was a battlefield—and my mom was the general, armed with practicality, marshaling friends and family far and wide as they used their clippers. Her goal was efficiency. She was a single mother, working exhausting hours, doing what she could; and that typically meant finding the cheapest haircut available. For us, that was often the $5 Chinese barbershop down the street.
The Chinese barber once gave me some sort of bacterial infection on my scalp—I still have the bald spot. But if I’m being totally honest, almost every haircut I had early on was a disaster. My aunt used to cut my cousin’s hair and mine in her bathroom. The experience was excruciating: hot clippers, jagged lines and occasional cuts to the skin. My uncle once put a literal bowl on my head and trimmed around it. And my mom’s boyfriend, well, he’d eventually become infamous for destroying one of the most important hair moments of my young life. With a record like that, I never saw getting a haircut as something to enjoy. It was something to survive.
That changed in second grade. I was 8 years old when my teacher’s daughter, who was dating a barber, offered to take me to a Black barbershop. It was a small gesture on her part, but it was a monumental shift for me. For the first time ever, I walked away from a chair smiling. The cut was clean, the vibe was affirming, and my edge-up was sharp. I remember confessing my love to my crush the very next day after school, because I felt just that confident. She ultimately rejected me, but I still felt like the man.
After that, hair became something I cared about. Which is why, not long after, when my mom’s boyfriend cut my hair again before my first day at a new school and ruined my edge-up beyond recognition, I wept. I cried the entire night. Because now I understood what was being taken from me: the feeling of looking like myself. The power of a good cut. The dignity of being seen the way you want to be. I didn’t grow up with my dad to teach me the mechanics; and truth be told, being Nigerian, I’m not sure he would have added much value anyway. My uncle was Nigerian, too—see the bowl cut.
So everything I learned about my hair, I learned the hard way, like how waves weren’t just about brushing. When I was 12, I spent hours dragging a dry brush across my scalp, trying to carve waves into my head like a sculptor, until my hair turned into a crop of bone-straight thistle across my head. Then I discovered pomade—and overcorrected. My hair was greasy for months. But eventually, I figured it out. And when those waves finally showed up, it felt like I had unlocked some secret code: a private joy, hard-earned and deeply felt. High school opened the door to reinvention. I experimented with Mohawks, flat tops and as much hair dye as I was allowed.
My hair became a revolving diary, a physical manifestation of whatever phase I was in at the time. When I was shopping at Hot Topic, wearing studded belts and listening to “Party Like a Rock Star,” à la the 2007 Shop Boyz, I had a Mohawk. When I was deep into 80s and 90s fashion, I rocked a high flat top. Every style was a response to who I was becoming or wanted to become. Hair was language. It said what I couldn’t always afford to say through clothes. It gave me access to style when money didn’t. I’ve always believed that how you present yourself to the world is a form of preemptive self-belief. Fashion doesn’t just help you show who you are; it helps you become the person you’re growing into. Hair does the same: You don’t just wear it. You wear yourself through it.
That belief only deepened as I got older. In a Nigerian household where long hair on boys was practically a sin, the idea of getting braids felt like crossing a forbidden line. I didn’t get them until I was 27. Growing up, if I wasn’t next to bald, my hair was seen as wild and unruly. So the first time I sat in a stylist’s chair and felt my hair pulled into parts, woven tightly into plaits, it felt like more than a new style—it was a reclamation. A late-coming rite of passage I wasn’t allowed to have before. Then came the grays. I found my first ones at 25, but by the time I was 28, they had taken over an overwhelming amount of real estate. At first, I panicked. After a call with my dad, who told me he was fully gray by the age of 33, it all made sense. The panic turned into pride. This, too, was a style I’d come to wear. A page in the archive. A sign of time doing what it does best: evolving you.
These days, my hair is a site of freedom. I’ve done a lot, but Bantu knots are still on the list. I use a lot of Cécred—because it works, but also because if I’m trusting anyone with my hair, it might as well be Beyoncé. I’ve also become obsessed with beads. As someone who loves jewelry, I feel there’s something beautiful about adorning your tresses the same way you do your body. A simple way to add the weight of personality to a style. A small ornament of self woven into my roots. If there’s one thing this journey has taught me, it’s that style isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about becoming. My hair has been a timeline, a mood board, and a trial-and-error guide to growing into myself, bad haircuts included. It’s given me space to experiment, permission to fail and reasons to smile in the mirror again. All this is proof that what felt like a battlefield became a magnificent canvas.
Credits:
Photographed by Elianel Clinton / @ohyeahitseli
Hair: Neyikha Zamy at House of Braids 509 / @houseofbraids509
Production: The Morrison Group / themorrisongroup
Location: The Manner / @themanner
Fashion Credits (black leather look):
Full look: Louis Vuitton Men’s
Tie: Vintage
Shoes: Dr. Marten’s
Glasses: Bonnie Clyde
Watch: Zenith Defy Skyline