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TUV

TUV

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Making the ten year old version of himself proud

Iyaniwura Firekanmi goes by TUV, short for True Uncut View, and the name is less a stage persona than a promise about how he intends to be looked at. Born and raised in Lagos, from Oyo State, he works across modelling and art in a way that refuses to separate the two, treating a shoot, a painting, and a video as different angles on the same restless energy rather than different jobs.

It started, as it often does, with dress-up. His mother had a pair of oversized glasses she'd put on him constantly as a kid, and he'd find new ways to style them almost on instinct. Visual arts became his favourite subject in school not because he was disciplined about it but because he was experimental, drawing whatever came into his head and showing it to a teacher who took a real interest and eventually gave him private lessons. What stuck with him wasn't just the craft, it was watching someone move fluently between mediums without hesitation. "He could do anything," TUV says, and that fluency became the thing he chased for himself, the one skill that came to him without a fight.

Everything he makes now still answers to a version of himself that hasn't changed since he was ten. At that age he was already telling his father he wanted to be famous, already writing rap lyrics, already carrying a kind of light he refuses to let self-doubt near. "The light has always been within," he says, and keeping that ten year old's sense of play alive, rather than outgrowing it, is what he credits for the exaggerated colour in his paintings, the shifts in his style, the sheer energy that shows up on camera. None of it is calculated distance from who he used to be. All of it is an attempt to stay exactly that unguarded.

He's quick to credit the people around him, close friends Debby, Rachel, and Odey, for shaping how he sees, calling them unreal for having supported him from the very start and crediting their intellect for sharpening his own perspective. His other major reference point has never met him. He returns constantly to Hedi Slimane's work, studying it the way you'd study something you're trying to absorb rather than imitate. What he's chasing across both influences is the same thing: proof that there's no ceiling on what a single person can imagine into existence. "If I can imagine it, I can bring it to life," he says. "Don't put yourself in a box."

The work itself moves fast and stays loose by design. He describes his current world as spontaneous, going deeper into fashion and art without a fixed plan beyond continuing to learn, on the theory that repetition, not strategy, is what actually moves anyone forward. Since May he's been out shooting almost daily with his videographer Bolu, moving through Lagos in a way he calls a task on its own, absorbing lessons from the city's hustle culture that no amount of planning could have taught him faster. He values that process over whatever result comes out the other end of it, treating the grind itself as the actual education.

What still catches him off guard is the scale of who's watching. A kid from Lagos finding an audience of thousands scattered across the world isn't something he's fully gotten used to, and he doesn't try to perform composure about it. Strangers cheering him on, sight unseen, still moves him to actual tears sometimes, a reaction he doesn't hide because hiding it would defeat the entire point of working the way he does.

The most common misread of his work is that it's staged, that the persona on screen is a performance layered over something calmer underneath. He rejects that outright. "This is real life," he says. "I am really this lit." There's no split-screen version of TUV waiting behind the camera once it stops rolling.

Where it's headed next, he's deliberately vague about, uninterested in narrating his own goals in public and comfortable letting his life stay as spontaneous as it's always been. What he holds onto instead is a plain conviction that the work will eventually catch up to wherever he's actually meant to land. Global is the word he uses. Keep watch.

TUV

Everything he makes now still answers to a version of himself that hasn't changed since he was ten. At that age he was already telling his father he wanted to be famous, already writing rap lyrics, already carrying a kind of light he refuses to let self-doubt near. "The light has always been within," he says, and keeping that ten year old's sense of play alive, rather than outgrowing it, is what he credits for the exaggerated colour in his paintings, the shifts in his style, the sheer energy that shows up on camera. None of it is calculated distance from who he used to be. All of it is an attempt to stay exactly that unguarded.

He's quick to credit the people around him, close friends Debby, Rachel, and Odey, for shaping how he sees, calling them unreal for having supported him from the very start and crediting their intellect for sharpening his own perspective. His other major reference point has never met him. He returns constantly to Hedi Slimane's work, studying it the way you'd study something you're trying to absorb rather than imitate. What he's chasing across both influences is the same thing: proof that there's no ceiling on what a single person can imagine into existence. "If I can imagine it, I can bring it to life," he says. "Don't put yourself in a box."

TUV

The work itself moves fast and stays loose by design. He describes his current world as spontaneous, going deeper into fashion and art without a fixed plan beyond continuing to learn, on the theory that repetition, not strategy, is what actually moves anyone forward. Since May he's been out shooting almost daily with his videographer Bolu, moving through Lagos in a way he calls a task on its own, absorbing lessons from the city's hustle culture that no amount of planning could have taught him faster. He values that process over whatever result comes out the other end of it, treating the grind itself as the actual education.

What still catches him off guard is the scale of who's watching. A kid from Lagos finding an audience of thousands scattered across the world isn't something he's fully gotten used to, and he doesn't try to perform composure about it. Strangers cheering him on, sight unseen, still moves him to actual tears sometimes, a reaction he doesn't hide because hiding it would defeat the entire point of working the way he does.

TUV

The most common misread of his work is that it's staged, that the persona on screen is a performance layered over something calmer underneath. He rejects that outright. "This is real life," he says. "I am really this lit." There's no split-screen version of TUV waiting behind the camera once it stops rolling.

Where it's headed next, he's deliberately vague about, uninterested in narrating his own goals in public and comfortable letting his life stay as spontaneous as it's always been. What he holds onto instead is a plain conviction that the work will eventually catch up to wherever he's actually meant to land. Global is the word he uses. Keep watch.

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© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.

© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.

© 2026 Vitality Vanguard.