Imane Ayissi, the first sub-Saharan designer to show in the Paris fashion week dreams of"opening up a new path for Africa" in an"alternative way of doing luxury fashion."
Highly colourful wax cotton prints flooded West Africa after Dutch mills began turning out millions of rolls of the material with patterns borrowed from Indonesian batik in the 19th century. With his show called "Akouma" or "wealth", Ayissi has tried to create a debut collection that nods both to the depth of indigenous African know-how and the fact that haute couture is also preserve of the ultra rich.While every piece is painstakingly handmade, as haute couture demands, the designer has had recourse to African materials and techniques rarely if ever seen on the Paris catwalk.
His childhood home was a crossroads of many worlds: politics and boxing from his father and fashion from his mother, a former Miss Cameroon. That re-awoke childhood memories of cutting up and re-sewing his mother's and his aunt's old dresses.He staged his first Paris fashion show in 1993 "for his friends" with some 200 dresses, of which "only one or two" really worked, he remembers with laugh.