The cowrie appears on an AAJIYA blazer as a print, yet it is not merely an ornament placed on a neutral jacket. The shoulder is broad, the fit deliberately generous and the shell repeats across a form associated with public authority. In the house's own PÉTAW oversized blazer, a familiar tailored object becomes a carrier for a specific visual history. The print attracts attention; the cut determines how that attention meets the person wearing it. Maimuna Cole has built a practice in which the two decisions belong together. Her clothes ask what it means to take up space without discarding memory to do it.
Cole was born in Sweden and has Gambian roots. In a 2021 interview with Vogue, she described spending part of her childhood in Gambia, where an atelier operated in the house in which she lived. She watched garments being made and remembered her grandmother combining leftover fabrics. The label's name honours that grandmother, Aji Ya Nije, as Cole explained in a separate 2021 interview. She encountered clothing as work, inheritance and invention. Her current products extend that early experience through contemporary choices about print, tailoring, manufacture and sales. The family history gives those choices a context without determining their form.
Her first experiments included blazers with batik or African prints when she was a teenager, according to both interviews. Later, she studied business management, developed a collection in Senegal and saw musician Seinabo Sey wear one of her designs at Way Out West in 2019. That sequence contains more work than the common fashion story in which an influential wearer creates a brand overnight. The garment had to be conceived before the performance, and the brand needed a plan to continue after it. Cole's studies make sense alongside her ambition to build production and employment connections between Europe and West Africa, an ambition she articulated in 2021. The AAJIYA production page now says the company works with factories in Portugal and Sweden. Her earlier ambition and the present arrangement belong to different moments in the label's development.
Cole's account of the first blazer project gives that early stage a more exact shape. At sixteen, she designed and sold blazers with African prints for a school assignment and donated the proceeds to an SOS orphanage in Gambia, as she told Dopest. The blazer was already a garment through which she could test a visual idea and find out whether somebody wanted to wear it. Selling the pieces required a price, a customer and a finished object rather than a sketch alone. That small exercise helps explain why the later business training sits naturally in her story. Cole's artistic ambitions were joined early to questions of making, circulation and what the work might support beyond its first wearer.
A print with a history
The PÉTAW collection placed the cowrie shell at the centre of its visual language. Cole told Vogue that she wanted the print to restore attention to the shell's history and to the cultural meanings she felt had been flattened by fashion's casual use of it. In the Dopest interview, she explained the shell's significance in the terms of her own research and naming tradition. Cowries have carried different meanings across African regions and periods. Cole's own intention is more specific: she chose an image whose value to her exceeded its decorative appeal and built a collection around making that value visible.
How does such an intention reach a garment? The current blazer shows one answer. AAJIYA's product page describes an oversized tailored fit, pronounced shoulders, front buttons and a silk lining. It lists a cloth containing polyester, cotton and elastane, made in Portugal, with the shell print as a named detail. The silhouette and the image perform different jobs. The shell repeats over the surface, but the jacket's scale changes a body's outline. The silk lining is hidden when the jacket is closed, yet it affects how the garment slips over other clothes. A print alone could be transferred to a bag, poster or scarf. In the blazer it has to live with the more difficult questions of shoulder shape, sleeve movement, fit and what the wearer sees when she opens it. The front buttons add a second state to the garment. Closed, the blazer gathers its generous cloth into a tailored outline; open, it becomes a layer over whatever the wearer chooses beneath it. Cole places the emblem where others will see it, while the garment gives its wearer control over how much of the printed surface is presented at once.
The distinction helps avoid a lazy reading of cultural reference. It is possible to praise the cowrie motif while saying nothing about the garment's design. Cole's PÉTAW blazer invites a more exact description. Its generous fit gives the wearer room rather than pinning the shell image tightly to the body. Its broad shoulder recalls the visual authority of formal tailoring. The front closure allows a shift between a contained outline and an open layer. The effect changes with the person who wears it. The designer's current campaign statement links the shell to memory, lineage and power; the cut gives those ideas a wearable form.
The coat as a proposition
The TANTA long tailored coat develops a related proposition at another scale. The house describes an oversized tailored outline, front buttons, side closure details, working front pockets and the shell print. Its listed fabric composition and silk lining match the PÉTAW blazer. A long coat changes the distribution of print and proportion. It has to negotiate how the body moves beneath a larger continuous surface; a motif that punctuates a short blazer can become a field across the length of a coat. The shell is not confined to a single hero piece. It is being tested across shapes with different everyday demands. The coat’s working pockets and side closures matter to that test. Pockets interrupt a long printed surface at the point where a hand reaches in; a side fastening can change the way the outer layer meets the body. A blazer can be removed at the threshold of a room, but a coat may remain visible during the walk toward it. Across those uses, the same image changes scale and position within a person’s day. Cole’s design problem is therefore not simply whether the motif is recognizable. It is whether a printed textile can remain coherent as the garment’s function and length change.
AAJIYA's site currently offers gloves, earrings, shirts and outerwear alongside the PÉTAW blazer. The range suggests a developing house rather than a collection of one-off images. The shift among categories asks whether the central idea can survive movement between scales. An earring puts the cowrie near the face, where its outline may be read as an object. A blazer turns it into a repeating surface. A coat lets it cover an entire silhouette. Cole's decision to make these categories converse can give the collection coherence without requiring a customer to wear the same print from head to toe.
The shop also brings the design into contact with production information. The blazer and coat pages identify Portugal as the place of manufacture and describe a made-to-order lead time of several weeks. The production page says most pieces are offered by preorder and that limited quantities are restocked according to demand. Under that arrangement, a customer may wait for a garment rather than draw from a large stockpile. AAJIYA says Cole has visited its factories and checks standards. A tailored piece thus moves from a chosen garment to a production schedule shaped by orders, linking the garment's form to the way the house makes and delivers it.
The person inside the clothes
Cole has described the emotional test she applies to a design as a question about how its wearer will feel on entering a room. That focus can sound like ordinary empowerment language until the garments are considered. The oversized shoulder and generous fit do not make a wearer physically larger in every dimension; they alter the outline that other people encounter. The cowrie print announces a point of reference. A side closure gives a coat another way to arrange its surface. The person wearing the clothes remains the agent who chooses how to carry all of this. In that sense, AAJIYA's marketing phrase about presence points to a real design problem: how to provide form without scripting the wearer's entire performance.
The house's About page frames its work in terms of grandmothers, mothers and daughters. Cole's own childhood account makes the language more specific. Her grandmother did not merely provide an image for a moodboard. She handled leftover cloth, assembled pieces and wore what she made. The act joins thrift, skill and self-presentation. Cole's present garments use different techniques and a different production setting. The current PÉTAW and TANTA product pages show new production in Portugal with stated fibre compositions. The connection is better understood as an inherited permission to make a garment carry one's own story, even as tools and supply chains change.
There is a risk in treating a Swedish designer with Gambian family ties as a permanent translator between two fixed cultures. Cole has spoken about the difficulty of finding room within Swedish fashion and about her wish to change how African fashion is perceived globally. Those are her accounts of professional conditions and ambition. They do not mean every AAJIYA garment must be decoded into one Swedish part and one Gambian part. A shoulder line can also be a shoulder line; a silk lining can be chosen for feel; a broad coat can answer a wardrobe need. The design deserves close reading on those terms as well as on the terms of its declared references.
Cole named Selam Fessahaye as a designer whose visibility encouraged her. The two practices differ. Fessahaye has pushed tulle, costume scale and reworked occasion wear into startling runway images. Cole's current AAJIYA shop returns repeatedly to the cowrie and to constructed tailoring. The point of influence is permission to imagine a larger place for oneself, rather than a shared formula for how a garment should look. Cole's choices of shoulder, fastening and surface give AAJIYA its own visual identity. Her account also places her within a living Swedish fashion conversation, with one designer's public example helping another envision what might be possible.
Building a house rather than a moment
The public milestones matter, if kept in proportion. The PÉTAW collection drew international coverage in 2021. Cole won the Damernas Värld Knappnålen award that year, and a 2024 Jotex Design Award announcement named her its first recipient. Awards can help an independent designer secure attention and resources; they cannot replace the quieter work of fitting, manufacturing, financing and delivery. The continued existence of AAJIYA's current catalogue is evidence that the label has moved beyond one photographed launch. Its present product pages name fabric blends, linings and manufacture, details that bring the garments into sharper focus than an award citation can.
Cole's earlier hope of building production in Gambia sits beside the house's current account of manufacture in Portugal and Sweden. A label's supply chain can change as its orders, available skills and production needs change. In AAJIYA's current arrangement, the PÉTAW blazer and TANTA coat are described as made to order in Portugal. The distance between Cole's initial plan and these garments marks a business still being shaped alongside the design.
The latest AAJIYA campaign language says the collection returns the cowrie to a context of value and lineage. A fashion brand cannot by itself recover all the histories attached to a symbol, and its sales page is not a history museum. It can choose to tell customers why a motif matters, avoid treating that motif as anonymous decoration and put it into garments with a considered form. Cole has made those choices visible enough to examine. The oversized blazer's shoulder, the coat's length, the repeated shell and the made-to-order model connect image, object and business. Each asks Cole to adapt the original motif to a different demand.
Cole's most interesting promise is therefore less about a slogan of confidence than about an actual set of design tasks. A shell must be placed; a print must meet a cut; a shoulder must hold its shape; a lining must make the garment wearable; a manufacturing plan must bring the piece to the customer. Each task changes how an inherited image exists in the present. AAJIYA's story begins in an atelier Cole remembers from childhood, but it does not end there. It continues every time she decides what sort of room a new garment will make for the person inside it.