The education of Tunji Dada

Part 4

by Ellen Barry

Dada was 15 before he discovered that fashion existed at all. In Lagos, as an orphaned teenager, he used to sell airline tickets to the kind of women who would become his clients. They would fly to London on Friday afternoons and return early Monday morning with bags from Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent. Dada booked their flights and wrote out their tickets; his interest in them was not fashion-based.

"I thought about fashion as a tailor, like in the corner of the street," says Dada. "I thought you didn't make money by being an artist. That's what we were told back home. Nobody buys art for their homes. So I had that mentality."

He had been raised to make money in a gentlemanly fashion, which meant law or business or engineering. The eldest son of an Air France executive, he grew up in a world where some of the kids had chauffeurs and everyone spoke three languages. At 10 he was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, and at 11 he enrolled in a Catholic school in Togo where the students -- "the foreign kids, the ambassadors' kids, the kids of presidents" -- slept in a long room where bats screeched from one end to the other and made it hard to go to sleep.

Then, when he was 14, both his parents died in rapid succession -- his mother in childbirth, his father in a car accident -- and Tunji was suddenly living alone in his father's bungalow in Lagos. At 22, he emigrated to Boston, where he had heard it was possible to work and study simultaneously. That's what he did, maniacally, for the next 10 years -- using his salary from security jobs and a stint in the kitchen at Boston City Hospital to pay for engineering classes at Roxbury Community College and Bunker Hill Community College. Dada has slept four hours a night for so long that he thinks it's all he needs.

"My first job when I got here was horrible," he says, laughing. "I was working in Dedham, and living in Cambridge, and I had to take three different forms of transportation: bus, bus, train. It cost three dollars and forty-five cents to make that trip."

His engineering plans derailed for good when a friend brought him to a drawing class, and eventually he was accepted into the Massachusetts College of Art fashion design program. He would do his homework during double and triple shifts as a security guard at 1731 Beacon, where he buzzed tenants in the front door and drew patterns right there on the counter. Eventually, one of them asked him to make her daughter a dress for a bat mitzvah. He did four separate fittings for the dress, and she paid $150. Looking back now, he figures he lost money on it.

Dada stopped buzzing tenants in six and a half years ago, and since then has been supporting himself through custom orders. His operation has barely grown; he still lives in his studio. The seven family members he has helped immigrate from Africa still live the way he used to -- with second jobs, triple shifts. Meanwhile, Dada was entirely happy just to be doing what he loved to do. Until recently.

"I never thought of money when I started," he says. "It was pure joy. And that was the reason."

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Ellen Barry can be reached at ebarry[a]phx.com.