My chat with Bousso was held, like so many things these days, over Zoom. The weirdness of meeting people this way appears not to phase us; by month four of distanced socializing, the odd anxiety of virtual introduction is absent, or at least abated. We dive into her background from the jump, and immediately I can see that Bousso is ardent about the heritage of her brand and exacting in how she approaches design—two characteristics that fortify Diarrablu from the inside out. “I call it a blend of the authentic and the automatic,” Bousso says of her growing brand, which utilizes a skilled mathematical groundwork and marries it with the beauty and fluidity of fashion. Now in residence at the Fashion Incubator San Francisco, Bousso splits her time working with the incubator, writing code and algorithms that dictate her clothing patterns, and further developing her brand through a holistic, thoughtful approach. We spoke about her time spent in Silicon Valley, the hard-fought process of her merging each of her passions into one cohesive brand, along with the meaning of identity and design in an evolving world—and an often stunted industry. Bousso shares the story of her family with me—a long line of Senegal artisans who have honed their craft in pursuits such as leather working, metalworking, and ceramics. While she received a more westernized education, this rich history and heritage is very much a part of who she is and what she stands for. Before the inception of Diarrablu, Bousso studied mathematics and moved to New York City to pursue a career in finance.
“My very first job, I was actually in finance on Wall Street,” she says. “And that’s when I first had this identity crisis. We’re making all this money, we feel so powerful, but I felt empty. And I felt very detached from who I am.” That feeling would eventually drive her to search elsewhere for meaning and satisfaction through her work. Prompted by her love and respect for artisanal tradition, Bousso pulled on this thread and ultimately applied to business school with the intention of developing and growing her brainchild—a sustainable fashion label that was rooted in African tradition. When Stanford University offered her a place in their MBA, again Bousso hesitated. “I thought, this is great, but I was afraid if I went there I’d get formatted into how I think about business,” she says. “The way I think about business is not just dividends and revenue. Yes, I want that to be good, but that’s not what I think about first when I think about maximizing value. When I think about maximizing value, I want to maximize the impact of that heritage across the world. I want the whole world to know where Senegal is. I want them to know that we are skilled and we have all these gifts.” The prospect of falling in line with the traditional business school model seemed to directly oppose her true mission. “I felt like I was having this amazing opportunity given to me on a silver platter, and here I was asking myself existential questions and being spoiled,” she explains. “Everyone said, you’re being so entitled. You should go. But I ended up declining.” Declining, as it turns out, allowed for Bousso to pursue the field of education instead, also at Stanford. Finding her sweet spot at the intersection of math and art, she began asking pivotal questions about the relationship between these two things. How do you use math to create art? How do you use art to teach math more effectively in schools? “I got a job as a teacher—I still teach—and my time became very scarce,” she says. “I was teaching, I was grading all the time. One night I was just like, I don’t think I can keep teaching and designing and painting and doing photography—all these things can’t happen, it’s only twenty-four hours. I was correcting this student’s work, it was some graphics stuff, and it was full of mistakes. And I put them on top of each other and thought, these mistakes are hideous math-wise, but when you put them together they create nice patterns, so maybe I should think about that.”
From there, the idea quickly germinated. Bousso set to work realizing this vague idea into a mathematical reality. “That whole weekend I just couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I was on the computer coding and writing equations and generating patterns and shapes.” The resulting clothing bears Africa in mind, utilizing shapes and patterns to their full potential. Her stunning UMY Gyraf Convertible Jumpsuit, for example, can be tied nineteen different ways. Moreover, each piece sings with a fluid, functional versatility expressed in both vibrant and earthy tones. She’s received no formal fashion training, which she cites as a benefit to her craft. It allows her to approach the industry from a new lens, unfettered by the preconceived notions of how fashion is “supposed” to work. What is now deemed as one of her greatest strengths, however, was at first viewed as a considerable hurdle. Of her idea to marry the aesthetic world of fashion with the exact world of math, Bousso explains, “I struggled for a while because it just doesn’t sound like anything that makes sense to anyone. I would say things like, ‘I want to work with artisans but I want to incorporate math,’ and people would just start laughing. And finally last year it started happening and we started getting more press and then everyone said, ‘Oh my god this is fascinating,’” she laughs. “I’m like, oh okay. I’m glad you think so.” Her ability to brush off the status quo and ignore the initial skepticism of others largely informed her success. In fact, had it not been for Bousso’s insistence on marrying her life passions together—at times even stretching herself quite thin to do so—Diarrablu may never have been born. By approaching the problem from an innovation standpoint, rather than solely a design standpoint, Bousso was able to bypass many of the fashion industry’s most profound struggles. Lack of sustainability, namely, being the most pressing. Of the typical fashion supply chain, she explains that,“By the time a dress is made, it’s been in ten different countries, [touched by] fifty different people, and you have no idea who you are empowering in the process or who you’re hurting. And it takes a long time. I don’t have any of that. My process is so simple, so easy to manage, and the level of risk is very limited, and it’s super transparent.” Moreover, her process is human. She invests in each level and lateral of the design and production process.
“I could tell you the names of who’s doing what at each level,” she says.“It’s like three people, including my mom. I can empower the whole chain. Ninety-nine percent of my supply chain is artisans in Senegal. For me this is a humane approach to design, I’m keeping the heritage but the technology is what’s making it happen.” That’s not to say that her production is slowed or constrained. In fact, her foundation in algorithmic solutions inherently addresses that very problem. “This [allows] me to have no excess inventory,” she says. “It allows me to have full control over what I make. I can constantly crowd source in terms of using social media to know what people like. We produce on a monthly basis and run this whole fashion brand like a restaurant. So what is ordered, I commit to make. I work with artisans in a country that wants jobs, that want opportunities. They are there, they are hired already and committed to a salary. Every day they come to work just like chefs come to a restaurant—you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you know you’re going to work.” With technology keeping the business moving forward, Bousso and her team of artisans can focus on the beauty of the clothing, and the power of the people creating and wearing the designs. “A robot or an algorithm is a tool, but it’s not an identity,” she says. “I’m going to use all of that as a tool—and I want to emphasize that it’s a tool, it’s not the main thing—but the root of my identity and what I do is that artisanal heritage.” As we begin to wrap up our conversation, I ask Bousso how she understands and views the connection between design and life. I want to know how these two things dovetail in her mind and work, in a society that is coming to terms with the fact that we’ve forgone one of these things in pursuit of the other. “To me, when you say design and life, it’s like you’re saying the same thing. Design is life,” she explains. “From an identity standpoint, because of the family I was born into, design is life. If there was no design for them, there was no life. It’s how they express themselves. But from a survival standpoint it’s also how they’ve lived. It’s how they pay the bills. To me, it’s life and it’s survival.” Looking at the bigger picture, she also sees the interconnectedness of everything we do. How design has to be diverse and thoughtful and careful in its execution, or else it’s not truly serving its purpose.“For me, life is the pillar, and design can stand upon it. Not the other way around. And they have to be able to work in symbiosis for it to work.”— Diarra Bousso “Design has to be in symbiosis with life, with nature, with all the cycles,” she says. “I think that what the fashion industry fails to do is focus on design, and forget about life. I think that’s why we’ve been having all these problems—with waste, with how people are being treated. You forget about the people that work in the process, about diversity and inclusivity, and Black lives and Black brands—it’s been forgotten for many years. All this talk about waste and the environment—nothing else mattered, it was always design, design, design. Design by itself doesn’t exist without life. For me, life is the pillar, and design can stand upon it. Not the other way around. And they have to be able to work in symbiosis for it to work.” Today, Diarra Bousso’s growing brand has attracted the eyes of major fashion houses and publications, including Vogue—who last year featured one of her swimsuits in an editorial spread, worn by none other than Kendall Jenner. These moments she cites as pivotal and unspeakably exciting. But it’s also the dedication and interaction with her customer base that fuels her work, the line of communication she’s established with buyers through social media. Bousso is actively bringing that community and identity to the world of fashion, keeping her passion and pride at the forefront. “At first I thought a slogan could be ’Made in Africa.’ Then I thought, I don’t want to say that. That limits me to Africa. I want to be bigger, I want to be made of Africa.” she says. “What matters is what’s creating and fusing all of this magic is the heritage I have, it’s this way of thinking.” // Learn more about Diarra Bousso and her team of artisans, and shop her line at Diarrablu.com. Photography courtesy of DIARRABLU unless stated otherwise.
