Does Afrobeats Have a Look? The Question Behind Its Next Era

At this year’s Met Gala, where fashion was treated explicitly as art, UK Afrobeats journalist Gracey Mae found herself circling a deceptively simple question — one with surprisingly large stakes for the biggest sound on the planet. Does Afrobeats have a look? And, without one, can the genre truly graduate from a community into a culture?

Her framing is sharp, because every great genre has worn its identity on its sleeve — literally. Hip-hop has its baggy denim, its oversized shirts and vests, its jewellery. Rock has the black leather, the studs, the silver. Punk had its safety pins, grunge its flannel, emo its fringe. These are not just clothes; they are instantly legible signals that tell the world what the music stands for before a single note plays. They are a visual handshake. Afrobeats, for all its planetary reach, has no equivalent shorthand. You can recognise it in a second by ear. You cannot necessarily spot it across a room.

That is the crux of Mae’s question, and it is more than an idle one. A genre can dominate the streaming charts and still feel like a scene rather than a movement. A defining aesthetic is part of what allows music to transcend its core audience and embed itself in the wider culture — the difference between people who listen to a sound and people who live inside it. Fashion is how music becomes an identity you can wear, a flag you can fly without saying a word. Without that, even a chart-conquering genre risks remaining a playlist rather than a way of life.

And yet there is a powerful counter-argument, and it may be the truer one. Afrobeats spans Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, the United Kingdom and France, and its strength may be precisely that it refuses a single uniform. From Wizkid’s understated, monied minimalism to Burna Boy’s full-throttle rockstar swagger to the alté scene’s thrift-store experimentation, the genre contains multitudes. Perhaps its “look” is range itself — and forcing one aesthetic onto it could flatten the very plurality that makes it global in the first place.

There is a deeper reason the question resists a tidy answer. Many of music’s signature uniforms were born in opposition — hip-hop’s out of the Bronx, punk’s out of rebellion, grunge’s out of disaffection. Afrobeats did not emerge as a subculture defining itself against the mainstream; it emerged aspirational, celebratory and plural, closer in spirit to Sunday best than to street uniform. Its aesthetic DNA is abundance and elegance — lace and tailoring, gold and colour, the owambe glamour of a Lagos party — rather than a single rebellious silhouette. That may be why no one look has ever stuck: the genre’s instinct is to dress up, not to dress alike.

What is undeniable is that a visual language is forming in real time, whether or not anyone formally names it. As African artists headline Met Galas, World Cups and global fashion campaigns — Tems on magazine covers, Burna in the front row, Olaolu Slawn designing kits for Nike — the imagery is accumulating into something coherent. The live question is not really whether Afrobeats has a look, but who gets to define it: the artists themselves, the diaspora stylists quietly shaping the culture, or the luxury houses now circling it for inspiration and credibility.

That last point is where the stakes sharpen. An aesthetic, once codified, becomes valuable — and value attracts ownership. If Afrobeats does settle on a defining look, the people who define it will hold real cultural and commercial power. Leaving that definition to outside gatekeepers, rather than to the communities that built the sound, would be its own kind of loss. The conversation about clothes is, underneath, a conversation about authorship.

Either way, Mae has put her finger on something real. As African artists move from the margins to the very centre of global fashion, the question of how Afrobeats presents itself — and who controls that image — is only going to grow louder. The answer may shape the genre’s next decade, and decide whether the most exciting sound in the world also becomes one of its most enduring aesthetics. For now, the look is still being written. The interesting part is that it is being written at all.

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