Adwoa Aboah and Cou Cou come together in support of Gurls Talk, a community lead non profit Adwoa started dedicated to promoting the mental health of adolescent girls and young women. Launched during Mental Health Awareness Month and realised in partnership with Dover Street Market London, the limited edition collab tee features the phrase “out of order” which is a celebration of life’s messiness and a disruption of the societal expectations that life throws on to us.
Designed to spark conversation and challenge the narratives we’re often told, the collaboration is both a statement and an invitation to embrace the full spectrum of our emotions, share our experiences, embrace imperfection, and recognize that it is often our most vulnerable moments, including the messy and uncertain ones, that connect us most deeply to one another.
As part of the project, Adwoa will also lead a series of conversations with Taiba Akhuetie, Janet Anderson, Missy Dabice, and Becky Akinyode, exploring mental health, feeling out of order, and the lived experience of women. These conversations, in the spirit of Gurls Talk, will run on Cou Cou’s platform with the shared intention of creating a space for women to be messy, vulnerable, and unapologetically themselves.
We chatted with Adwoa on the collab project:
HommeGirls: ‘Out of Order’ is such a simple phrase, but it holds a lot – what did it mean to you personally when you landed on it?
Adwoa Aboah: I love a t-shirt that stops you in your tracks and sparks a conversation. I’m a big collector of graphic tees. I have amazing vintage ones from years ago that reflect feminist sentiments and support abortion rights, some of them are incredibly risky. We landed on “Out of Order” because it had the humor that I was looking for. The phrase holds a lot of negative connotations, and I was looking for a statement that could be reclaimed. I felt that it very perfectly built the world that I was trying to portray: what it means to go through life and the messiness that we all experience, whether we struggle with our mental health or not. I think that with the right curiosity, this messiness can hopefully make us happier in the long run. It’s a hard journey and it’s not a linear one that at times can make you feel completely out of order. I’ve felt out of order at many times in my life where I’ve felt lost, but I have those moments to thank for the person that I am today. And on the flip side: what I’ve been interested in and have found in the women that I’ve been inspired by, is a frankness about who they are. Completely free of external validation and perception. Women who continuously disrupt the societal norms that have been placed on all of us as women. I’ve always aspired in my own life to do things in my own way. I wanted to dismantle the traditions that have always been. I’m not interested in being told what to do.
HG: You’re bringing together such an interesting mix of voices in the conversations for Cou Cou – what were you looking for in those women, and what do you think they unlock together?
AA: Rose [Colcord, the Founder and Creative Director of Cou Cou] and I spoke a lot about this. I recently did a TED Talk on shared experience being the root of knowledge. The reason I started Gurls Talk is this idea of storytelling and stories bringing us together. And how the ones we can relate to help us feel less alone in our own journeys. I was really interested in making sure we brought this project back to this community aspect, and it wasn’t just my story that we were telling. That it was rooted in real life experiences. I picked women that truly inspire me in different ways. They’re all such individual stories and different women, but when you get going and have these conversations with them, they’re essentially all saying the same things. They have their own worlds and careers but they all show up with this unashamed way of being themselves. Through art, style, screaming on stage, etc. They tap into everything I wanted to emote with the “Out of Order” statement. It’s a choice that they’ve all made, and for some of them it comes quite naturally, something that they’re born with, to be unapologetically themselves and to go against the grain. And for some of them it’s been a journey.
HG: There’s something very HommeGirls about taking something simple, like a tee, and letting it carry a bigger feeling. How do you think about style as a way of saying things you might not say out loud?
AA: The way I’ve always approached style and clothes is not always necessarily a reflection of the way I’m feeling at that moment, but more of a fake it til you make it energy. Sometimes you’ve got to put on that look to get you to a place of confidence. I’m very interested in the way that people wear clothes to stand out. And I think you can do it in such a way that disrupts the male gaze. Women are dressing sexy because they want to, for no other reason than for themselves. I love that style can be used as this disruption. That you’re taking agency over your societal perception and image.
HG: The importance and beauty of messiness and vulnerability comes up a lot in this project – what does that actually look like in your day-to-day?
AA: For me in my day-to-day, I’m just really honest. I’m not interested in fluffy, unrealistic ideas of life and one’s mental health journey. I’m frank and brutally honest. It’s messy, some of the things that I say. I’m not perfect, I’ve made mistakes, and I’m still figuring it out. I think that’s something that resonates in my community. I think it’s why I’m approachable and empathetic, because I know that the circumstances that are placed upon us: demographic, financial background, etc. There are so many reasons why things might not be simple and I’m interested in stepping outside of my box and celebrating those things. And being respectful and owning my privilege. These things aren’t black and white, so for me, it’s all about the mess.
