Chris Seydou is The Father of Malian textile
Seydou Nourou Doumbia, better known as Chris Seydou, is a Malian fashion designer who was born on May 18, 1949, in Kati, Mali’s Koulikoro Region, forty kilometers north of Bamako. He spent part of his youth in Ouagadougou (now the capital of Burkina Faso). As a kid, he began his design skills by developing styles for dress dolls. As Seydou’s mother was an embroiderer, he was exposed to the instruments of the garment profession from a young age. In 1965, his family apprenticed him to a local tailor, Cheickene Camara, whose designs had appeared in several Malian fashion papers.
In 1967, he returned to Burkina Faso’s Ouagadougou (then known as Upper Volta), where he started his first tailor shop. When he began his professional career, he changed his name to “Chris” as a tribute to Christian Dior, whose work had been a major influence on him, and maintained the name “Seydou” to preserve part of the name his family had given him. The next year, he relocated to the glamorous city of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, and then to Paris in the 1970s, where he worked with Yves Saint-Laurent and the stylist Tan Guidicelli for Mic Mac. Seydou studied European couture in Paris for seven years. In 1981, Seydou relocated to Abidjan, where he founded his namesake label and created his first line, Chris Seydou, which is still being manufactured today.
Applying European design skills to traditional African printed fabrics. Seydou popularized bogolan, a cotton-colored cloth made from fermented mud that goes back to the 12th century. During this time, his contemporaries included painter Ismael Diabaté, whose use of bologan in his fine art practice earned him international renown. Seydou’s most well-known and famous bogolan-related initiative was his 1990 work with Industrie Textile du Mali, a textile manufacturing business in Bamako, for whom he developed a bogolan-inspired fabric that was produced and marketed in 1990-1991. In 1990, Seydou went to his native country in quest of “the origins” of “true African customs.” Seydou reportedly grew closer to Alpha Oumar Konaré, the soon-to-be president and in 1993, Adame Ba Konaré, the President’s wife, wore Seydou’s tailored suit at the opening of a film festival in Marseilles. In 1993, he established the African Foundation of Fashion Designers, a forum committed to supporting and promoting designers on a worldwide scale, and he is said to be one of the three founders of the Fédération Internationale de la Mode Africaine (International Federation of African Fashion).
Chris Seydou died of a short illness in 1994, at the age of 45. His death sent shockwaves across the fields of fashion, art, and popular culture in West Africa. His son and a crew of tailors who previously worked with him continue to manufacture a bggùlanfini clothing line in Bamako. Chris Seydou was a trailblazer in exposing African fashion designers on a global scale. He designed clothes that relied on his Mali, West African heritage, yet his styles defied simple classification as African. More than anything, he was instrumental in instilling in African men and women a new way of thinking and viewing the world, and he inspired a slew of designers and models to aspire even higher. Mali gained recognition around the globe for its cultural riches as a result of his works, where black Americans now use bogolan as a source of cultural identification. Seydou’s legacy lives on in his Bamako-based tailoring studio, which continues to produce collections in the distinctive mud-cloth design, as well as in the numerous creatives he has influenced.
BY KEREN BEYA
@KEREBEAR_520