29 Jan

IMANE AYISSI Collection Couture
“The pride of being different should not prevent the happiness of being together”
Léopold Sédar Senghor

” The starting point for this collection was my desire to revisit two key wardrobe items
worn on the African continent : the boubou worn by men and women in most West
and Central African countries, and the Kaba, a loose dress originally imposed on
African women by European colonizers in the 19th century to cover their bodies and
shapes and which became a kind of national clothing in Cameroon.

But while working on these clothes, it appeared to me once again, their links in terms
of construction with other emblematic clothes from other continents : kimono type
clothes from the Asian continent for the boubou, Korean Hanbok or dresses worn by
women in China during the Tang era, without forgetting European dresses from the
very end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It is these links,
these relationships between elements of apparently extremely different cultures that
fascinate me.

So I thought of this collection as a journey between Asia, Africa and
Paris through time. This trip also involves the collaboration that I established with the
painter Wang Ying, who is also a diplomat and who paints Parisian landscapes with a
technique that relates to traditional Chinese painting but also impressionism. Wang
Ying has produced prints on silk and new ecological fabrics based on Bamboo, but
also paintings on fabric. “