Meet the Senegalese who left Wall Street to become a designer. Her beautiful prints are based on maths equations
Senegalese fashion designer Diarra Bousso is exceptional compared to others. She is a serial entrepreneur, creative mathematician and multidisciplinary artist.
She merges art and maths through the use of algorithms to create designs for her line DIARRABLU.
Unlike many, she had no experience whatsoever in fashion designing, but yet she left a career of trading on Wall Street to venture into fashion design.
She merges art and maths through the use of algorithms to create designs for her line DIARRABLU.
Unlike many, she had no experience whatsoever in fashion designing, but yet she left a career of trading on Wall Street to venture into fashion design.
Bousso, a graduate in mathematics, was born in Dakar, Senegal, but raised between her motherland, Norway and the United States.
She started her career as a trader in Wall Street as a structured
products trader and later asset finance analyst. After two years, she
left everything to start two direct-to-consumer fashion brands – Diarrablu and Diarrabel – in her native country, aimed at celebrating her cultural heritage while empowering local artisan communities.
Just to make her dream come through, for three years she traveled to
every Fashion Week she got invited to, tried networking whilst visiting
factories in Asia to learn their processes and train her Senegalese
artisans.
“It
was challenging because I had to invest a lot to travel and self-explore in a
field I knew nothing about, but my previous experience on Wall Street
definitely helped me to structure everything I saw into a business model and be
able to make projections,” she
said.
Apparently
her love for mathematics has had a great influence on her prints which are
designed based on mathematical equations. “Math was my first love. It’s the
only universal language I could connect with every time I moved and was lost
with new languages”.
She revealed that the main print for Diarrablu’s SS19 collection,
titled “Ndar”, was obtained from the graphing of various equations
(linear, quadratic and absolute value) to recreate randomized shapes.
The shapes were then filled with colors
and the patterns were cut into various shapes and went through
geometric transformations such as dilations, rotations and reflections
in order to create a final motif, printed on crepe and chiffon fabrics.
The main equations are parabolic of the form y=ax2+bx+c.
To create her Ndar print, Math equations are digitally generated,
graphed and hand-painted with touches of oranges, turquoise blues and
monochromes, inspired by the island’s vibrant architecture and the
resultant abstract pattern is printed on fabrics.
According
to her, the algorithmic patterns are abstractions of animal inspired prints and
have names like Gyraf and Zybra. “Our
rich African heritage is paramount in our design process as we work with local
artisans and seamstresses whose traditional techniques are passed from previous
generations”.
Reportedly,
Diarra’s paternal grandmother, the late Sokhna Mbow, was a renowned leather,
ceramics and metal artisan in the Baol region of Senegal. She is said to have inherited
the craftsmanship from her ancestors and passed it down to her children.
Explaining the impact of technology
on her designs, Bousso said: “Designing our prints algorithmically
allows us to generate hundreds of options but only printing the ones
that our audience responds to via social media. This has allowed us to
reduce fabric inventory wastage by 80% and take a closer step towards
sustainability”.
Designer Diarra Bousso pointing to her design credit on a photo of Kendall Jenner in VOGUE USA. Pic Credit: by Tijan Watt |
Her designs have been featured in Vogue, Glamour, Elle and the New York Times, and are available for purchase worldwide.
Bousso also works with a number of concept stores in Abidjan,
Nairobi, Brazzaville, Los Angeles, Washington, Miami and Aspen, with the
hope of expanding her international wholesale partners.
Bousso said she is working towards sustainability as a big goal with a focus on more circular solutions to textile design.
Her innovative use of
equations and algorithms in her beautiful designs has earned her an award as the
Designer in Residence at the San Francisco
Fashion Incubator.
Credit: face2faceafrica
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