Farouque Abdela
‘Fashion is about individuality, colours and madness –
Zanzibar has them all’ He’s dressed Princess Diana and been the darling of swinging London, but fashion designer Farouque Abdela is now focused on transforming the look and lives of his homeland, Zanzibar
“E
verything I wear is made in Zanzibar, except my glasses.” Fashion designer Farouque Abdela is holding court in the Secret Garden café of one of his favourite Stone Town hotels, Emerson Spice. He’s dressed immaculately in a loose black linen shirt and trousers, leather sandals and one of his own hand-printed waistcoats. The look is accessorised with a hand-made basket – bought on Pemba – and a similarly weaved fan that he flourishes to emphasise his points and battle the midday island heat. The hottest hours of the day usually find him in the cool confines of sister hotel Emerson on Hurumzi where the staff are resplendent in the shimmering peach uniforms he designed and his interior design skills have given the rooms an opulent update. Still, when we meet he is keen to talk over drinks at the Secret Garden. I have been looking forward to interviewing Abdela for some time and he does not disappoint. As he cuts through Stone Town’s labyrinthine lanes, fan in full effect, I hear him end a phone call with a potential client with the
It’s an arch comment that seems to come straight from the fierce fashion scene of London that Abdela moved in for almost four decades. His Afrocentric designs, put together with the embroidery and tailoring skills that were a family tradition and fine-tuned attending the London School of Fashion, brought him success and big-name clients. Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger is said to have turned up unannounced at the designer’s Abbey Road studio to buy his entire collection of waistcoats and Abdela also famously designed for Princess Diana – the pair bonded over a love of going barefoot – as well as author Maya Angelou and jazz musician Courtney Pine.
withering: “I wouldn’t get out of bed for that amount, darling.”
enchanted him as a young man. “I was getting lost in the streets
Farouque Abdela returned to Zanzibar in 2004
‘Kindred spirit’
Return to Zanzibar Still, it is clear that Zanzibar is where Abdela’s heart is. Many were surprised when he left London and returned to his birthplace in 2004. Even the designer himself had his reservations on arrival. The still lithe and dapper 69-year-old has said in previous interviews that he felt “traumatised” on seeing what had become of the ornate Swahili architecture of Stone Town that so
they were so different,” he says. “I thought this is not my home. All the buildings were falling apart in 2004.” But, Abdela – who left Zanzibar aged 14, two years after the revolution – has, since his return, set about reuniting Stone Town and Zanzibar with its past.
Famous client: Princess Diana Mark Reinstein/ Shutterstock.com
Some of that work surrounds us as we talk. The Secret Garden was until recently the tattered remnants of a marketplace, but Abdela has helped transform it into a stylish open-air courtyard restaurant by day and a cool music venue at night hosting local taarab bands. An array of potted plants adds a lush landscape and modern artworks hang in each cloistered, intimate seating area, but many of the walls have been left in their crumbling original form so as, Abdela says, “to retain the link between then and now”. Abdela found a kindred spirit in hotelier Emerson Skeens. He describes his friend as a “one of a kind who left a real legacy” in restoring such prominent, historic
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