Yola is a reporter at The Business of Fashion, and is based in New York City. She graduated magna cum laude from Northwestern University’s Medill School with a degree in Journalism and additional majors in Sociology and Global Health. She also inducted as a Kappa Tau Alpha scholar, having received national honours in journalism.

At The Business of Fashion, Yola covers youth consumer culture and trends. Her work explores how the Gen Z and Gen Alpha cohort are shaping the global fashion industry, how we think about luxury, the retail experience and how new technologies are being leveraged to alter how we shop. Since joining the publication in June 2022, she has reported from the front row of New York Fashion Week, where the latest fashion trends emerge; the floor of the United Nations, where stakeholders deliberate on how to best to lessen the industry’s ecological destruction; the frontlines of protests as fashion workers demand better working conditions and pay; the Met Gala, chronicling how the worlds of art, sport, entertainment and fashion collide; as well as in boardrooms where C-suite executives and founders lay out their strategies on capturing the mindshare of shoppers.

Yola also has bylines in CNN, STITCH Magazine and North By Northwestern Magazine and pens a Substack newsletter called ‘The Column,’ where she explores fashion, culture and politics from a Gen Z lens.

Of South African heritage, Yola’s journey to journalism began with her being immersed in multicultural environments and institutions. She has lived and studied in four countries (South Africa, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the United States) and her experience compelled to think more deeply about how we all, regardless of identity, use fashion as a tool for self-creation. In her work, Yola uses fashion as a prism to understand how politics, culture and history shape how see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others and society at large. Fluent in five languages, she is passionate about learning about and telling the vibrant stories of the people around her.

Yola was recently awarded a scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business to attend its flagship programme for business journalists and was recognised by the institution for contributing unique insights to the world of business.