Chris Seydou

 

Chris Seydou (1949-1994) was a trailblazer in promoting African fashion designers on a global scale. He designed clothing that drew on his Mali, West African roots, but his designs defied neat categorization as African. Seydou was well-known for his haute couture adaptations of African textiles, such as Mali's bogolan fabric. Seydou's bell-bottom pants, motorcycle jackets, and tight miniskirts made of distinctively African fabrics sparked interest in Mali and brought attention to his work abroad. Seydou's designs have appeared in a number of French, German, Ivoirian, Senegalese, and Malian fashion magazines. He exhibited his work in Europe and Africa, and he collaborated with internationally renowned designers, most notably Paco Rabanne.

The Designer's Roots

Chris Seydou was born on May 18, 1949, in Kati, a small town centered around a military base forty kilometers north of Bamako, Mali's capital. Because Seydou's mother was an embroiderer, he was exposed to the tools of the clothing trade at a young age. Seydou was captivated by photographs of elegant women dressed in beautiful clothes that he saw in his mother's copies of European fashion magazines (Seydou 1993). At the age of fifteen, he dropped out of school to pursue his interest in fashion. His family apprenticed him to a local tailor in 1965. Seydou moved to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), in 1968, and the following year to the cosmopolitan city of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. When he began his professional career, he changed his name to "Chris" as a tribute to Christian Dior, whose work had had a significant influence on his early development. He retained the name "Seydou" in order to retain a portion of the name his family had given him, resulting in a professional name that combines the European and African influences that are evident in his work.

In 1969, Abidjan was at the forefront of African fashion design, and Seydou found great success there, designing clothes for many of the city's wealthy and influential women. Seydou then studied European couture in Paris for seven years, beginning in 1972. In Paris, he met other African artists and designers with whom he founded the Fédération Africaine de Prêt à Porter (African Federation of Ready-to-Wear Designers), an organization dedicated to promoting African designers on the global market. Seydou was also one of the three founders of the Fédération Internationale de la Mode Africaine, which continues to be an important forum for African designers. Seydou discovered that his work appealed to African women seeking clothes in "la mode occidentale," and that European women appreciated his "exoticism" (Seydou; and "Chris Seydou: Le roman d'une vie," p. 34). According to Seydou, these women bought his work not because he was African, but because he "brought an African sensibility" to his designs.

In 1990, Seydou returned to his birthplace. He came to Bamako to find "the authors, the origins" of "true African traditions" (Seydou 1993). He was especially interested in bogolan or bogolanfini, a cotton textile traditionally used for ritual purposes in rural Mali and known as mudcloth in North American markets. Seydou began using the cloth while working in Paris in 1975-1976. He described returning to Paris in 1973 or 1974 after a visit home and discovering several pieces of bogolan he had received as gifts in his suitcase. He'd known the material since his childhood in Kati, but he'd associated it with hunters and local ritual practices rather than his own interest in fashion. The familiar cloth was transformed into a souvenir in unfamiliar Paris, a reminder of the place and people of home (Seydou 1993).

Transforming Traditions

Seydou's work with bogolan and other indigenous textiles exemplifies the balance that many non-Western designers strike between local tradition and global markets. Seydou was more concerned with making Malian fabrics relevant to contemporary fashion than with preserving local traditions. Nonetheless, the cultural significance of the textiles influenced his methods, as evidenced by his work with bogolan. Some aspects of the fabric were edited, modified, or discarded, while others were preserved. "I am a modern designer who understands what I can do technically and how to do it. Bogolan can simply serve as a cultural foundation for my work "

One of Seydou's primary changes to bogolan concerned the density of its designs, as the fabric traditionally includes a variety of distinct motifs. Seydou found cutting and assembling a garment from this cloth extremely difficult because no two pieces of cloth are identical. Seydou adapted by commissioning his own versions of bogolan, isolating a single pattern and "decoding" the cloth. Seydou also expressed reluctance to cut and tailor material adorned with symbolic motifs, citing the cloth's ritual significance in rural Mali: "For me, it was symbolic. I didn't want to cut bogolan right away because it was difficult to get my scissors to it." Seydou (1993) Among Seydou's most well-known and influential bogolan-related projects was his 1990 collaboration with the Industrie Textile du Mali, a Bamako textile manufacturing company, for which he designed a bogolan-inspired fabric that was printed and sold in 1990-1991. Seydou's death in 1994, at the age of 45, had a profound impact on the worlds of fashion, art, and popular culture in West Africa and beyond. Many consider him to be the "Father of African Fashion Design."

The Chris Seydou Phenomenon

Journalists in Africa and Europe recognized Seydou's role as an ambassador between African and Western fashion worlds.

"He flouted every convention, showing bogolan made into mini-skirts or bustiers, as large berets or full-fitting coats and even as a fitted suit worn by the President's wife Adame Ba Konaré for the opening of a film festival in Marseilles in 1993. (Duponchel, p. 36) À travers ses créations, le Mali s'est fait mieux connaître dans ses valeurs culturelles à travers le monde, jusqu'en Amérique où les Noirs américains font aujourd'hui du bogolan une source d'identification culturelle. (Through his creations, Mali became better known throughout the world for its cultural treasures, all the way to America where black Americans today make bogolan into a source of cultural identity) (Diakité, p. 4). Chris Seydou en fut le premier artisan, faisant naître une generation de stylists de premier niveau, tous visionnaires d'une Afrique renaissante… (Chris Seydou was the first…, breeding a generation of first class designers, visionaries of a born again Africa) (Pivin, p. 7-8 Trans Gail de Courcy-Ireland). It all began with the unforgettable, incomparable Chris Seydou. More than anyone, he helped to give African men and women a new way of thinking, of looking at things, and inspired numerous designers and models to aim even higher. (Traoré, p. 8). "