Nine is a skate-adjacent streetwear brand that’s found its way, in recent years, to becoming one of the most talked-about emerging underground streetwear brands out of Lagos.
The name ‘Nine’ comes from his surname, Naiwo, also known as “9wo,” and the fact that it’s the highest single digit there is. Simple as that, but everything else about the brand traces back further, to a childhood spent absorbing fashion, music, and skateboarding culture in equal measure.
“I’ve always been interested in fashion and music from a young age. I grew up watching music videos on MTV all day. There was also a show called Zeke and Luther on Disney, and they used to skate, which I thought was so cool. Then I’d go back to MTV and see Lil Wayne skateboarding as well; that’s when I started bothering my mom for a board. I finally got it and started skateboarding.”
“Ever since then, I just subconsciously got into the skateboarding thing, started watching YouTube videos to learn and all that. Then when I started designing, the combination of the three things I loved as a kid- fashion, music, and skateboarding- shaped my design language.”
Building a skate-adjacent brand in a city that isn’t built for skateboarding doesn’t sound easy, and we were curious to know more about what it’s like carving out space in a city that was never built for it.
What’s the biggest challenge running a skate-adjacent brand in a city that isn’t built around skating?
“People are just not getting it. It’s definitely way better now, but a few years ago, before the skate park, we didn’t even have a spot to skate. We had to literally fight people when they’d try to take our boards or tell us not to skate somewhere. That lack of space and understanding, more than anything else, has been the real challenge.”
Shaped by all of it, Tobi designs for a specific kind of person: the ones who go right when everyone else goes left, who look at a six and see a nine instead. That’s the thread running through the brand: an insistence on being read differently than expected.
Every piece that carries the Nine name goes through him personally- fabric, collar, print, thread, all of it; he’s not interested in designing from a distance. Five years from now, he wants Nine to be everywhere, and at the center of it all is a simple idea he keeps coming back to: a nine is greater than a six.