An Ada festdrakt carries several decisions at once. In Haddy Jammeh’s own garment, colors chosen with Oslo in mind meet cloth rooted in West African textile traditions. It has the composed presence of Norwegian celebration dress, yet it does not claim to be a bunad from a particular district. Haddy Jammeh, the Oslo designer behind Ada, described her own garment in a 2026 interview as holding her entire identity within a Norwegian traditional form. The most interesting part of that statement is its attention to the garment. A color, fabric and cut can be chosen together so that a person need not edit herself before entering a celebration.
Jammeh was born and raised in Norway and describes her Gambian family heritage. Visit Norway's interview places her childhood in Holmlia, Oslo. Ada began from her experience of seeing Norwegian bunads and the clothing traditions of Gambian women in her family, while feeling that no available dress expressed all of her own connections. The studio she founded in 2024 now makes custom festdrakter with clients in Norway and a tailor in Gambia. Its work is design in the literal sense: it asks what a specific person will wear, which materials will carry meaning, how the pieces will fit, and which parts of inherited dress a new garment can bring into conversation.
The difference a festdrakt makes
Norway's bunad tradition is rich in regional forms, with established relationships among cut, embroidery, fabric and place. A festdrakt offers another path. As Visit Norway explains, a festdrakt can draw on the look and occasion of the bunad without claiming the same historical tie to a particular locality. That distinction creates design room. It lets Jammeh work with the recognizable formality of a Norwegian celebration outfit while making deliberate choices around a client's other histories.
Her approach does not require every dress to look alike. The silhouette has to hold the occasion: a national day, a wedding, a confirmation or another gathering where clothing becomes part of public memory. But the fabric, color, decoration and proportions can be negotiated. A client can bring cloth from home. Another can name a place or family tradition that matters. A designer then has to convert that conversation into an actual garment, one that can be worn for hours and encountered by people who may not know its references.
The Ada studio introduces its name through a Wolof expression for cultural traditions and frames the work as inheritance carried forward. The name is appropriate to a practice that treats heritage as something made usable in the present. Jammeh's designs are not replicas of any one old dress. They take the familiar task of dressing for a celebration and let a wearer assemble a more accurate account of where she belongs.
The studio's method also changes who gets to participate in design. In the Vårt Oslo interview, Jammeh says she designs in Norway with customers before a collaborating tailor sews the garments in Gambia. The client brings knowledge that cannot be replaced by an outside mood board; the tailor contributes the skill that gives an idea fit and finish. Jammeh directs the encounter between them. The garment therefore has multiple makers and sources of knowledge, even as her design vision gives Ada its coherence.
A garment received, a garment reconsidered
The problem that later shaped Ada became clear through a dress Jammeh did not make. In Visit Norway's account, her father gave her a Ghanaian celebration outfit in 2015. She wore it with a white shirt and Norwegian silver jewelry. The combination drew questions and admiration. What people noticed was an ensemble assembled across familiar boundaries of formal dress. The response suggested that the mix expressed something recognizable to others as well as to Jammeh.
The white shirt matters because it is more than a neutral backdrop. In a Norwegian celebration outfit, a shirt can establish a formal line around the neck and sleeves; jewelry can mark the day as significant. Placed with a Ghanaian garment, those elements neither turn it into a Norwegian bunad nor leave it untouched. They create a new arrangement whose parts remain visible. Jammeh's later work grew from the realization that this was a design question shared by other people who carried more than one inheritance into public life.
That discovery might have led to a fixed hybrid product. Ada instead works through made-to-order choices. Visit Norway reports examples including a dress made from old curtain cloth and another from a used sofa covering, alongside wool, brocade and Indian silk. The value of those materials is not identical. A curtain carries domestic memory; brocade can offer formal sheen and density; wool brings a different weight and warmth. Their presence in one studio shows that Jammeh is not prescribing a single correct fabric for a culturally mixed garment. She is asking what a given piece of cloth can do for a particular wearer and occasion.
The differences affect cut. A firm upholstery textile cannot be treated exactly like a soft silk; it may hold a bodice or skirt away from the body where another fabric would fall closer. A dress must take those properties seriously or its symbolism will fail at the first fitting. In Ada's work, the personal story enters through a material with a physical behavior. The designer and tailor have to make that behavior meet the wearer's body. Only then can the dress carry meaning without asking the wearer to endure it.
Blue, brocade and the choices inside a commission
Among the examples Visit Norway records are a Persian-inspired dress, a Moroccan variation in brocade, a South Asian silhouette and a blue outfit representing communities to which Jammeh belongs in Gambia, including Wolof and Mandinka. These are not interchangeable decorative references. A silhouette changes the relation between torso, skirt and sleeve. A brocade brings pattern into the structure of the cloth itself. The blue example carries Jammeh’s documented Wolof and Mandinka affiliations. The broad category “multicultural fashion” tells us almost nothing about those different choices.
In the 2026 Vårt Oslo conversation, Jammeh describes her own dress as combining West African-rooted cloth with colors selected partly with Oslo in mind. Her own color choices bring Oslo into one garment; a separate blue design honors her Wolof and Mandinka affiliations. In both cases, a color has a meaning chosen by the wearer rather than assigned by an outsider. The garment has to succeed at two distances: as clothing in the room, and as a set of details its owner recognizes even if a stranger does not.
A commission therefore starts with listening but ends in decisions that can be checked by eye and hand. How much pattern can a bodice carry before jewelry disappears against it? Does a skirt's weight support the desired movement? Which fabric should be close to the face, and which should carry the main expanse of color? Jammeh's documented range makes those questions concrete even when the answers differ from one client to the next. The individual dress is the unit of her design practice, while the studio's larger idea holds the series together.
This is why Ada's reliance on a collaborating tailor in Gambia is central rather than incidental. The maker gives structure to a garment intended for a real person, while the transnational partnership also connects the Oslo design conversation to skilled work elsewhere. The Vårt Oslo report identifies the stages clearly: design with the customer in Norway, sewing in Gambia. The finished dress carries the work of each participant. Its identity does not end at the sketch, the seam or the place where it is worn.
Mela and the first men's outfit
In August 2026, Ada designed a jubilee collection for the 25th Oslo Mela festival. The organizer describes women's, men's and children's festdrakter. This expanded Ada's practice from a series of personal commissions toward a group of garments made for a shared public event. A festival celebrating the meeting of cultures provided a precise setting for Jammeh's central question: how can a celebration outfit represent belonging without insisting that belonging has only one source?
The men's festdrakt was a first for Ada. Jammeh told Vårt Oslo that people had repeatedly asked when one would appear, and that the festival gave her the chance to make it. The request changed the scope of the studio. Jammeh had to apply Ada’s approach to a category she had not yet offered, and she did so for a festival whose program included garments for women and children too. What began as one woman’s search for a dress had become a proposal for people of several generations to share a public celebration.
The Mela program calls the collection an encounter with dress and textile traditions from several parts of the world and gives it three family categories. The three categories give the collection a family scale that earlier accounts of individual commissions did not have. The event presented the work at Rådhusplassen, Oslo’s civic square, amid music, food and visitors. The clothes entered the occasion they had been made to address. A person could encounter Ada’s idea as a garment among other people, rather than only as an image of a finished commission.
The expansion also makes the designer’s earlier public work easier to see. A Norwegian government account of 2024 events records Ada festdrakter being shown at Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo. Two years later, Mela supplied another public setting and a new range of wearers. Jammeh’s work moved from a personal need into places where the meaning of Norwegian dress is actively discussed.
Jammeh's connection to Mela preceded the collection. Vårt Oslo reports her years as a volunteer and host. The commission therefore grew out of an existing relationship to the event rather than a convenient thematic match. It joined a designer, a festival and a public whose experiences of Norwegian celebration are varied. The garments were presented at a place where people could see them amid the life for which they were made.
Dressing for a public day
A festive dress enters a demanding day. There may be photographs, ceremonies, meals and hours spent among family and strangers. A dress for such occasions faces the ordinary demands of movement and time. Jammeh makes each festdrakt with a customer for a real event, bringing the chosen cloth into a garment intended to be worn among others.
The Visit Norway interview notes that Ada garments are worn for weddings, confirmations and other occasions beyond Norway's 17 May national day. That range matters because it releases the festdrakt from one calendar date. A dress that can reappear at several celebrations has a different life from a costume made for a single event. It can gather new associations as its owner wears it again. The same cloth that first marked a national holiday may later be present in a family memory.
On Ada’s own account of its beginnings, Jammeh remembers growing up in Holmlia among people who understood themselves as belonging to several cultures. Only later did she encounter the expectation that she choose a single side. She watched Norwegian women in bunads on 17 May and Gambian women in their own formal dress, seeing two forms of pride rather than a contradiction. Ada’s clothing answers that memory through a concrete offering: a festdrakt shaped around the wearer’s chosen cloth and references. Inclusion here takes the form of access to a garment and an occasion.
There are also limits to the claim a dress can make. No single outfit can resolve the question of who gets to feel at home in a nation. Jammeh does not need that impossible burden for the work to matter. A garment can offer one person a better way to take part in a celebration and show others that its familiar visual rules allow more variation than they assumed. Ada works at that scale: one wearer, one fitting, one public day, then another.
Jammeh's own words on the Ada site ask why a person should have to wear only one culture when she can embrace her whole inheritance. The answer in the studio is not a universal pattern. It is a series of festdrakter with differing textiles, forms and colors, designed through conversations and made with a tailor across continents. A blue dress, a brocade variation and a first men's outfit do not look alike because their wearers and occasions are not alike. Together they show how a celebration dress can be both recognizable and newly personal. The garment leaves room for the life that enters it.