The Semiotics of Nigerian Fashion Discourse: Language, Identity, and Cultural Globalization

Fashion discourse in contemporary Nigeria constitutes a rich semiotic domain in which language, material culture, and visual sign systems intersect to negotiate identities that are simultaneously local, diasporic, and globally positioned. This dissertation develops an original semiolinguistic analysis of Nigerian fashion discourse across three intersecting domains: high fashion brand communication, street fashion social media discourse, and traditional textiles naming and marketing. Theoretical foundations integrate social semiotics, sociolinguistics of globalization, and African cultural studies to construct a framework termed polycentric semiotic positioning that accounts for the complex identity negotiations visible in Nigerian fashion communication. The empirical programme encompasses analysis of five hundred digital fashion brand communication texts from Nigerian designers active in Lagos Fashion Week from 2021 to 2024; a corpus of one hundred thousand words of Instagram fashion discourse from three hundred Nigerian fashion influencer accounts; and a documentation of naming conventions, marketing language, and cultural narratives for five Nigerian traditional textile traditions including Aso-Oke, Akwete cloth, and Kampala print. Semiotic analysis of brand communication reveals a systematic indexical economy in which Yoruba and Igbo cultural signifiers are deployed alongside global luxury register as co-equals rather than as local colour supplements, constructing a Nigerian luxury identity that positions Lagos as a global fashion node rather than a peripheral market. Street fashion discourse shows more complex and contested identity positioning, with significant variation between accounts oriented toward local and international audiences. The traditional textile analysis documents linguistic revitalization through fashion marketing that reconnects commercial names to endangered cultural narratives. Keywords: fashion discourse, semiotics, Nigerian identity, cultural globalization, social semiotics.