Lamine Badian Kouyaté is better known for his love of color—and his use of wax prints and stretch fabrics—than for his long-standing commitment to what he calls “making great things with less.” For 30 years, though, this pioneer of sustainable fashion has been doing just that under the label Xuly.Bët (a Wolof expression meaning “Keep your eyes open”). Now, with buyers, editors, and customers increasingly on the lookout for both joyous and conscious clothing, it seems that the world is finally paying attention to Kouyaté’s work. (Xuly.Bët is available at xulybet.com.)
That’s a welcome development for the 58-year-old designer, who spends seven days a week in his studio in a Brutalist concrete building in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, making dynamic dresses and bodysuits with stretch tulle or an assemblage of Lycra scraps—all connected with his signature red vein-like overlock stitching. “The body is something we can celebrate, not hide,” Kouyaté said on a recent virtual walk-through of his fall 2021 collection, which is twinkled with metallic Lycra leggings, African prints made into parkas and jackets, fuchsia suiting, an upcycled-and-retailored trench, and solid knit dresses that go with everything.
Making body-con looks for women of all shapes and sizes is nothing new for Kouyaté, who has always had an inclusive view of beauty. Around the same time that Azzedine Alaïa was creating second-skin looks using the distinctive Tati check, Kouyaté was shopping the same bargain store for materials to make into one-off wonders that were accessible to all women—including outer-arrondissement Parisiennes; immigrants; and young people who, like the designer, were operating in the liminal space between cultures.
Turning a Page
The label made a splash in the October 1993 issue of Vogue.
Photo: Roxane Lowit
Born in Mali, Kouyaté is one of seven brothers. “When we were young, we were really open to the world,” he says. “When I grew up in Bamako, everything came from the outside: images, music—we would listen to music from London, from the United States, from everywhere.” So many of the garments available at the local flea market were American that it was nicknamed “Broadway.”
Wearing hand-me-downs and customizing secondhand garments was a way of life that Kouyaté brought with him from Africa to France, where he studied architecture and came to admire Frank Lloyd Wright, whose work, he found, “was about how we can do things with less and have a respect for the environment.”
Despite Kouyaté’s love for metallics—the shiny pieces in his fall collection were inspired by the foil that wrapped his mother’s favorite Quality Street chocolates—his work is grounded in bohemian idealism. “The faith that feeds us is like love; that’s for sure,” the designer says. Let’s not forget the funk, though: “Funkin’Fashion” is, says Kouyaté, the spirit of the collections, and the phrase reflects his love of music—particularly the deep grooves of Jimi Hendrix, which, the designer suggests, helped him to create his own universe, one in which African and European traditions meet and mingle. (When he’s not designing or listening to Hendrix, Kouyaté will likely be playing guitar himself—or cooking mafé and poulet yassa for his friends and family.)
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