Filhas do Barro / Daughters of Clay
On Santiago, Cape Verde, seven women potters speak of the livelihoods they have built in clay and the knowledge they will leave to their daughters. “Clay has been my source of livelihood,” one of the women says early in Filhas do Barro. “Ever since I started working alongside my mother, clay has been my school.” […]
From Korhogo Cloth to Digital Print: Alia Baré and the Language of Senufo Textiles
The garments in Alia Baré’s SS26 collection move the way the cloth that inspired them never could. Stylised birds, animals, human figures and hatched borders travel across dresses cut long and light, in a fabric made to drape and follow the body. The imagery is Senufo. The fabric carrying it is not. The Korhogo cloth […]
Architecture as an Atlas of Resonance
It begins in memory: the filtered light of a courtyard, the coolness of a shaded passage, the threshold between public and private. It begins, too, in the physical intelligence of making: the hand drawing a line, shaping a model, testing a material, and turning an intuition into something tangible. Born in Fez, Morocco, the French-Moroccan […]
If This. Then That: Chairs – Pierre Jeanneret → Jomo Tariku
If you understand why Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh chair commands the saleroom, you’ll recognize what Jomo Tariku’s Nyala was built to change. IF YOU LIKE PIERRE JEANNERET Civic equipment that became a saleroom fixture. Teak and hand-woven cane, compass legs, Chandigarh, c. 1955. Batch-made, discarded, rediscovered. The appeal is modernism with a paper trail: the […]
North African Design and Its Geographies
Above: ALTIN, Our AlUla Trilogy, Wadi. Photograph © Lorenzo Arrigoni The Institut du monde arabe has named twenty-six finalists for the fourth edition of its Design Award, across four juried categories, showing at the IMA from 10 to 20 September with the ceremony held the evening before. A Public Prize, new this year, runs across […]
What Beadwork Is Worth
It took Noormesuku Kereto more than two months to finish the necklace. It was an Enkarewa, the wide beaded collar a Maasai woman wears at her wedding, and this one was made for a safari camp in the Mara rather than for a bride, which changes who will look at it but not how it […]
Adirẹ and the Wrapper-Wearers
My relationship to adirẹ is perhaps an unusual one; it begins not with indigo, but with cassava. In 2024, I returned to Nigeria for a two-month residency with the G.A.S. Foundation to study cassava’s role and cultural significance in the country. It was the longest I had spent in the country since leaving at five […]
If This Then That: Sculpture — John Chamberlain → Gonçalo Mabunda
If you understand why John Chamberlain’s crushed cars matter, you’ll recognize what Gonçalo Mabunda built from the weapons of a war. IF YOU LIKE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN John Chamberlain transformed crushed automobiles into sculpture, showing that industrial scrap could carry the same expressive force as bronze or marble. Rather than erase the material’s past, he preserved […]
NAANIYA: The New Language of Modest Fashion
Fashion entered Madina Tangara’s life long before NAANIYA existed. Her father was a sapeur, a man who understood the quiet power of dressing with intention, and her mother carried an effortless elegance and a deep appreciation for style. “I understood early on that clothing could carry meaning beyond appearance,” she says. That conviction became the […]
Diarra Bousso Builds Fashion From Mathematics, Technology, and Craft
Diarra Bousso’s first breakthrough arrived disguised as a mistake. It came not in an atelier or a studio but late one night in a classroom at Stanford University. Stacks of algebra assignments covered the desk in front of her. She was grading papers, tracing her students’ attempts to graph linear equations, absolute values, and quadratic […]