Pentagames: How Agbobly Wove Togolese Football Culture Into Grief and Joy at NYFW

Football, memory, and fashion entwined

At New York Fashion Week, Agbobly’s “Pentagames” collection stood as both remembrance and reinvention. It wasn’t only about clothing; it was about the rituals of play, the inheritance of culture, and the way football, in particular, can carry grief, memory, and hope across borders.

Agbobly dedicated the show to his late brother, Salhadine—the sibling he once played football with in the streets of Lomé, Togo. That memory was not background inspiration but the heartbeat of the collection.

On the runway, players dribbled across the floor in vintage Nike Total 90s, evoking the same mix of joy and competitiveness that marks street matches across West Africa. The gesture brought immediacy to the show: the runway became not just a stage for garments but a pitch where memory, mourning, and play converged.

In Togo, football is more than a pastime. It is a social fabric, binding together children, families, and entire neighborhoods. Matches unfold on dusty lots and narrow streets, often with improvised goals and barefoot players. For young people, football is a school of resilience and a space of imagination—where one learns not only skill, but community, survival, and ambition. It is a dream and a discipline at once. That duality—joy tangled with struggle—is precisely what Agbobly translates into his work.

By naming the collection Pentagames, the designer gestured to the pentagon panels of a football, but also to the deeper, sometimes harsher, games of life: the rules no one chooses, the losses no one expects, the lessons learned too soon. What emerges is a meditation on how grief and play exist side by side, inseparable forces shaping both personal memory and cultural identity.

In weaving football culture into his vision, Agbobly insists that fashion is not detached from lived experience. Instead, it is a vessel through which the collective memory of a place—its sounds, its games, its losses—can be carried forward. For those familiar with the rhythms of Togolese street football, Pentagames resonates as both tribute and transformation.

On one of the world’s most visible stages, Agbobly reclaimed football not as a backdrop but as a cultural epicenter, proving that the game, like fashion, is a language of survival and joy. Pentagames made clear that the spirit of play doesn’t vanish in grief—it endures, it evolves, and it shapes the stories we choose to tell.

Styling: Lily Zhang @zhangylily

Hair Lead: Dre Demry- Sanders @dre_on_hair

Hair & Make-up: New York Makeup Academy @newyorkmakeupacademy

Production: Modem Creative Projects @modem_creative_projects_

Runway Photographer: Johnny Nguyen @cutakesphotos

Detail Photographer: Vivian Chan @chan.vivian

Photographer: Won Jun Seok @wonjunseok

Photographer: Antonio Moore @antonio.moore_

Photographer: Maurice Kollie @rosegoldreese

Photographer: GP @jeepeezee

Runway Film/DP: Ryan Kang @ryan.kang__

Public Relations: Jorian Hunter Communications @jhc.ny