Anybody who is familiar with the menswear corner of YouTube will have detected the rising profile of the entrepreneur Okey Onyegbule, a Nigerian-American businessman based in Dubai, who threw off the daily grind of life in finance some years ago to pursue a lifelong passion – tailoring. Since 2019, Onyegbule and his team have been aggressively promoting on social media (mainly on YouTube) their colourful sartorial project, branded after the owner, ‘AskOkey’, which claims to provide the world’s only fully-online bespoke tailoring service. The videos on their channel invariably star Onyegbule himself, sometimes with an interlocutor in the form of his business partner Pete Barlow, in which he and his associates discuss every possible facet of classic menswear, and answer questions and comments from the channel. Onyegbule’s rise to internet fame can be traced to many things, but more than anything else is his deliberately polarising approach to men’s fashion. In his videos he rages against ‘drainpipe trousers’, his derogatory term for the fashion-forward trend in favour of skinny fit trousers, rails against the wearing of anything but black shoes with business suits, and proselytises for his company’s ‘full-cut’ approach to tailoring, which involves the use of heavy fabrics for superior drape, jackets cut longer than the typical length one might find in ready-to-wear, and pleated, high-waisted trousers with width exceeding anything to be seen elsewhere. Trolls in the comments often ridicule his fondness for ‘full-cut’ trousers that appear to the untrained eye to simply be too baggy. I happen to occupy a middle-ground between the current appetite for skinny-fit and his own orthodoxy, which is inspired by the sartorial traditions from the golden age of men’s tailoring many decades ago. Onyegbule takes it all in good humour, gently chiding his haters and even taking glee in the controversy his project appears to cause. His devoted fans have taken to calling him ‘Proff’, because of the detailed way in which he breaks down the way in which tailoring works and how men should approach the nuances of classic style – everything from what cloths to wear for what season, to how the shoulders of a jacket should fit, to the virtues of suspenders.
In addition to the long-form videos that he makes, the channel produces plenty of shorts in which, as ever, Onyegbule himself is the main attraction. Onyegbule himself is a deeply charismatic figure. He is a bombastic, eloquent man who is also tall and powerfully built (indeed, his vigorous athletic pursuits are videoed and displayed for popular consumption on his personal social media), and, in an environment dominated by Caucasian faces, is probably the most prominent black menswear influencer on the Internet today, certainly when it comes to classic men’s style. Indeed, a common criticism hurled at him is that his tailoring flatters his body type but would hardly suit the average person. In response to this, Onyegbule often irritably insists that the ‘bespoke’ nature of his company means that the full-cut he champions can be cut to fit any body type, and that the extremes that he adopts in his own tailoring need not be copied slavishly by everyone. He is unsparing in his opinions, not afraid to hurt feelings or antagonise the sceptics and the critics – a clever marketing technique, for sure, particularly given the niche nature of what he is doing.
The dizzying array of suits and blazers worn by the channel’s founder, of every cloth and colour, all produced by his own tailors after his full-cut design, are a big part of the draw of his channel. Onyegbule himself is the organisation’s main model, and almost all of the images and videos that they use to advertise their clothing are of Onyegbule, which somewhat undercuts his insistence that his design can work for any body type – a greater diversity of models is something that would allow Onyegbule to evade this criticism much more easily.
There is a lack of online reviews of Onyegbule’s services. A simple navy suit from his company costs can cost just over $3000 US (about £2,200 in UK currency). One enters in one’s measurements following the on-screen instructions, together with pictures of oneself in different positions, and this is sent to the company and used to produce a pattern of the person’s body shape. This is then used to create the garment. Unlike on Savile Row, there are no endless rounds of fittings before the product is produced. This probably allows the garment to be cheaper than what one might get on Savile Row, but it is not clear how reliable this method is for anyone who is not the founder himself.
The team around Onyegbule is slick and professional. A cursory glance at the earliest videos his channel produced shows how far they have come since the days when they began as an extension of a classic menswear blog that Onyegbule put together for himself and a group of fellow suit enthusiasts. All videos are shot in a special studio that is designed to look like a tailor’s shop, with an eye-watering display of tailored blazers and suits that must be well above what the average watcher can afford. Time (and more reviews from customers) will tell whether Onyegbule’s crusade yields the transformational results that he promises his clothing can provide.
I am a fan of Onyegbule’s. His no-holds-barred repudiation of contemporary fashion, his genuine enthusiasm for the traditions of classic men’s style, and his exuberant personality, all make him a great salesman. He has a deep knowledge of the subject and probably gives the best breakdown of how tailoring works of any major classic style channel I can think of, including Gentleman’s Gazette. He may have some questionable shibboleths (like his insistence on the necessity of suspenders for every pair of trousers), but his channel is genuinely informative, even for those who cannot afford his services (and I am one of them). He is funny, opinionated and at times crude, but he is never dull. His personal Instagram does seem a touch narcissistic at times – the endless footage of Onyegbule dancing and singing in his tailored clothing (or this bizarre video of him marching up and down in a morning coat) can become somewhat tiresome after a while, but at least he represents something a little less staid in the world of classic men’s style – and that just might be what we need to revive it.