When the clock struck midnight on January 1, ushering in not only a new year but a new decade, there was little reason to believe that 2020 wouldn’t be forward-looking. Ten months later we find ourselves living in a present that is informed, and sometimes haunted, by the past. It’s a time of reckoning and a time of reconnection.
It’s also a time to stay small and local while thinking big, which has always been XulyBët founder Lamine Badian Kouyaté’s way. Building on his African heritage, the designer works responsibly, collaging and patchworking existing garments and materials into new designs.
The phrase “it takes a village” came to mind while listening to Kouyaté and XulyBët CEO Rodrigo Martinez describe how their spring 2021 came together with the help of friends old and new. Honey Dijon, who did the music, belongs to the latter category; Michaela Angela Davis, the former. Kouyaté knows the activist poet from his days in New York when Davis was writing for *Vibe* magazine. He asked her to write a poem this season, and her recitation of that work, “Fire This Time,” played in the show venue (you can listen to it here, as well). Kouyaté dedicated this show to Amy Spindler , the late *New York Times* fashion critic, who donated her XulyBët collection to the Costume Institute, to which the designer has recently sent a piece for exhibition.
Davis’s powerful words speaks to the theme of the show: the empowerment of women in a time of growing conservatism. “I’m still trying to bring through my work, through my mind, and everything I can do to support this issue,” the designer said on a Zoom call. “We believe,” adds Martinez, “that women are the solution for whatever comes next.”
This collection is largely built around the white button-down shirt. “It’s a symbol of power,” the designer says, one that women “borrowed from the boys.” Moreover it’s a sort of blank page—at least from the front. XulyBët’s Funkin’ Fashion logo is printed on the back of at least one upcycled version. Several of the men’s looks feature languid robes. Kouyaté says they are based on traditional African menswear; they also can be read as representing a softer kind of masculinity.
The collection’s “heroine” look is a pieced Lycra bodysuit worn with a transparent coat, both featuring Kouyaté’s signature red overlock stitching, which looks like veins. The designer describes them as scars, but however you read them, they communicate resilience and hope, the possibility of holding things together. In Kouyaté’s work there is literally a red thread that links past to present, in terms of material, technique, and philosophy. “You can listen to the blues,” he says, and “you know, even if this music came out of suffering you can feel this joy, [this] positive energy, [the music is] talking about love. For me, this is the message.”
