When Kizz Daniel’s “Buga” dropped in 2022 and became one of the biggest Afrobeats anthems of the year, audiences were dazzled by the carnival spectacle of its music video. What they didn’t see was the stylist behind 120 people and 150 looks running on a strained budget and limited time. In a candid new interview with media personality Gbemi Olateru-Olagbegi on The Fashion Roundtable, celebrity stylist Swazzi has finally pulled back the curtain on what it really took to make that video happen.
Given just two weeks to deliver carnival-ready looks for a cast of 120, Swazzi quickly discovered that Nigeria’s costume rental market was nowhere near equipped for the scale of the job. “I reached out to the Lagos State Government, and they were like they had just a few,” he recalled. Custom pieces were off the table; the budget simply wouldn’t allow it. So he did what resourceful creatives do: he went searching for options. “I reached out to people in Calabar and rented like 50 from there, and I rented a bus and people that will bring it and supervise it on set.” The production stretched far beyond Lagos. “We went as far as Abuja and Kano to shoot,” he said. “It was a lot.”
The financial strain became an issue. Carnival costumes, Swazzi explained, are both expensive and fragile, a dangerous combination on a production of this size. When his fee proved insufficient to cover the full scope of the work, he made the difficult decision to bridge the gap himself. “I ended up investing my own money on that project because the money I was paid wasn’t enough to do everything,” he said. He raised the shortfall with the production team. “I told TG Omori’s team and they said don’t worry, we’d make it back.” For Swazzi, this was also a trade off he was willing to make as he believed in the project and the doors it would open when done well.
The full episode featuring Swazzi and Zack Styling is available now on Gbemi’s official YouTube channel.