One Day with Joanna Masiyiwa, Founder of AMAYI

ONE DAY WITH | MASTERS & MUSES | WORLD OF CABANA

In this series, we glimpse into the daily lives of artists, designers, creatives and tastemakers. Joanna Masiyiwa, founder of AMAYI, approaches fashion with a collector's eye, commissioning specialist textiles, numbering each finite edition and embroidering personal histories into cloth. Emma Becque joins the designer in her exuberantly patterned Marylebone showroom, where African art, Yoruba beadwork and Fès zellige provide a fitting backdrop to a young fashion house preoccupied not with the next season, but the next generation.

INTERVIEW BY EMMA BECQUE | MASTERS & MUSES | OCTOBER 2026

I am, unequivocally, a lark; a member of what has come to be called the 5am club. I would like to claim it as a discipline cultivated over years, but the truth is rather less virtuous: my body clock simply wakes me at five o’clock each morning, and once I am awake, I am awake. There is no snooze. Most mornings, there is no need for an alarm at all.

Having grown up in South Africa, I have come to understand sunlight not as a pleasantry but as a necessity. I live in Marylebone, in a flat whose most generous feature is its high ceilings. In the mornings, light streams in. 

Every morning, I pray. My spiritual life is central to who I am; it keeps me sane and offers a perspective that the rest of the day tends to obscure. The routine that follows is simple and largely unchanging - prayer, then breakfast, then coffee. I have come to believe there is no more fitting way to begin. 

My breakfast is always soundtracked with a podcast. I am drawn to stories of building; How I Built This with Guy Raz is a constant, but in equal measure to Katy Hessel’s The Great Women Artists and to This Is Actually Happening. My breakfast tends to move in phases. There was a period of smoothies, then one of açaí bowls. At present I am in what I can only describe as a creative oatmeal phase - peanut butter, chopped dates, chia seeds - an earnest, if not entirely glamorous, commitment to starting the day well. 

Marylebone remains my favourite part of London. My commute is mercifully short; the showroom is close to home.  This location has retained the scale and intimacy of a village, with its coffee shops and its own particular energy. I spend the morning working from home and arrive at the showroom around midday, because so much of what I do first requires quiet.

I always read two books at once: one for growth, the other for nourishment. I don’t really watch television, so books occupy the place that series might for others; I move between them, reluctant to put any one down. At the moment, Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and Amy Smilovic’s Almost Reckless sit on one side of that ledger; Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River on the other. Alongside them, Katharine Graham’s Personal History, Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake. It is rarely, in truth, just two.

My showroom was put together with love, and it is the place I most want to work. Focus comes easily to me. I am, by temperament, passionate and somewhat obsessive; when a subject captures my attention, I zone in completely. The first hours belong to problem-solving, whatever was not resolved yesterday is resolved first thing today, which most often means ensuring production is on track.

In life I take inspiration from my mother, family photographs, fabrics and museum objects. I prefer to close the day with creative work: returning to my reference library and to anything that might refine the visual language of the house. 

I am not much of a lunch person. When I do go out, I prefer it to be a social occasion. My choice is Fischer’s in Marylebone, where I meet a friend and always feel transported to another time. I order the chicken schnitzel with spätzle, pickled cucumbers and fries. It has yet to disappoint.

Afternoons belong to the team and to making. We tend to hold our meetings then, and when a supplier visits, it is in the afternoon that we explore ways to develop new, bespoke fabrics. It is also when I am most likely to draw, or to give myself room to discover new ways of making prints.

Do I ever really finish? Because I care so deeply about what I do, there is no clean beginning or end — only the discipline of compartmentalising. The problems that cannot be solved in the moment stay at the showroom, and at weekends I allow myself to step away from the everyday mechanics of building a business.

The search for inspiration, however, does not stop: references, ideas, anything that might sharpen my design sensibility. I don’t mean that I cannot rest. I mean that this part of the work is a blessing, and blessings are difficult to set down. I am making things I believe deserve to be made, beautifully and thoughtfully, and so I think about them constantly.

I don’t find it easy to switch off, which is precisely why I read so much. My mind is restless by nature, and lying still doing nothing has never been how I am built. Switching off, for me, is not the absence of attention but its redirection, towards something I am interested in purely for its own sake. At the moment, that is a history of cancer, and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag. 

The things that distract me most are human connections, which is a curious thing to call a distraction, since they are ultimately so positive. But when I am with someone, I am entirely present, and time simply dissolves. One emerges from a three-hour lunch having debated the precise properties of Yves Klein blue.

I am an extrovert, but I prefer to be one within the confines of my own home. I love hosting, game nights, people I love gathered around me. That is not to say I don’t appreciate a fine restaurant; it is simply that I am most at ease in my own space, among my own people.

A good spa day is my ideal day off. I recently experienced Sauna Medicine at The Bothy at Heckfield Place, and it felt remarkably close to nature, restorative and rejuvenating in a way I had not quite anticipated. 

A room I keep thinking about is my father’s study when we were children. It felt like such a serious room, a place where serious conversations were had, and important decisions were made. To this day, I associate mahogany, leather, and burlwood with that particular kind of gravity.

If I weren’t a designer, I would be a professor. Once, I would have said filmmaker, though I suspect that will still happen in some form; film gave me my visual language, and it is what taught me to see fashion differently, to understand how to make clothes that live in the real world. But I think I would love to teach.

I consider myself a student of life, and I hold enormous respect for those who have mastered their subject. I would want to devote myself to a single field and understand it from every dimension, down to its language, perhaps development studies in Africa, contemporary art, or theology, particularly the Judeo-Christian traditions.