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Growing up in Chichester, a small city in the south of England, the fashion designer Olivia Ozi-Oiza Chance often heard talk of this or that “English rose.” The term — used to describe a pale-skinned, pink-cheeked female beauty — unsettled Chance, who has a British father and a Nigerian mother. “It made me question: ‘Am I beautiful? Am I desirable?’” she says.

This week, the designer’s namesake brand, Oiza, returned to London Fashion Week with a collection that’s both a re-examination and a repudiation of the English rose. The clothes may be romantic: a cotton lace vest with a row of baroque pearls, a gathered duchess satin skirt with cutouts. But, like all of Chance’s work, they were partly conceived to subvert longstanding aesthetic ideals. “Britain is becoming more and more diverse,” says Chance, who was one of five designers selected this year by the British Fashion Council DiscoveryLAB program, which highlights the work of rising talents, “and beauty standards need to be changed to reflect society.”

ImageOiza spring 2025.Credit...Silvia DrazImageOiza spring 2025.Credit...Silvia Draz

For research, she looked to archetypal English gardens, but also beyond them. One of her main inspirations was the artist Harold Gilman’s circa 1905 “Portrait of a Black Gardener,” thought to be the first full-length British painting of a sub-Saharan African person without other subjects. Chance pays tribute to this gardener — who wears a white button-up, taupe slacks and a pensive expression — with one of the collection’s genderless pieces, a cream-colored jacquard button-up that’s styled in the lookbook with high-waisted floral brocade cargo pants. Other elevated takes on workwear include a pair of straight-leg overalls in supple brown suede and a black apronlike dress with a delicate lace band across the front. References to Chance’s Nigerian side also abound: A stone-colored crocheted cardigan with a scalloped edge that calls to mind the garment of an Englishwoman tending her garden is adorned with cowrie shells (once used as currency in West Africa), and a beige crochet halter-neck dress has been hitched above and below the hips in a nod to the wrap skirts Nigerian women wear to tend theirs.

ImageOiza spring 2025.Credit...Silvia DrazImageOiza spring 2025.Credit...Silvia Draz

These pieces are the fullest expression to date of a vision Chance, 31, has been developing for most of her life. “I was very immersed in my two cultures from early on,” she says. “We had African sculptures and my mom would cook Nigerian food a lot.” It was Chance’s mother, a model turned skin-care entrepreneur, who’d wear a gele (head wrap) and other staples of traditional Nigerian dress to church, who sparked Chance’s interest in fashion, even if, like most children, the designer wanted to fit in with her friends and usually dressed accordingly.

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