Business - Market for the Holidays
Style with a Purpose By Siobhan Reid, Travel+Leisure, October 2020
Diarra Bousso CNN
BORN TO A FAMILY of artisans in Dakar, Senegal, Diarra Bousso has always had a flair for fashion - "Where I'm from, the women are always impeccaly dressed, and it's the norm to get all of your outfits handmade by a tailor." But her passion for math runs just as deep. After moving to the United States, she earned undergraduate degree in the subject and worked as a trader on Wall Street before launching her online fashion company, Diarrablu (www.diarrablu.com), in 2015. The resort-wear brand comprises breezy caftans, versitile jumpsuits, and billowy trousers the majority of which are artisan-made in Senegal and feature graphic paterns generated digitally via algorithms (or lines of code) written by Bousso herself. Despite spending most of her time as a designer, she wanted to give back, so after earning her master's degree in math education at Stanford University, she became a teacher at a public high school in Silicon Valley, California USA. "People are always shocked when I tell them that I am a full-time fashion CEO and a full-time math educator," she says. "But it's so empowering to make the subject fun, especially for young women. And besides, math is just like designing, but with numbers." Her multi-job lifestyle is evidently paying o: last year, model Kendall Jenner was shot wearing a Diarrablu swimsuit for the pages of Vogue, and Bousso was invited to do an interactive brand "exhibition"-complete with select Diarrablu styles and a station where customers could use
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math to come up with their own prints- at Bloomingdale's in San Francisco. Up next, the designer is working to expand on her recently released Sustainable Essentials collection ($15-$300), which includes garments crafted from eco-friendly fabrics
like organic Senegalese cotton and Lyocell. But math education remains her biggest commitment: "With teaching, you see instant results, whereas with fashion, you wait six months to get feedback from your customers. So it's extremely rewarding to witness that transformation in my students." Image credits: fashionincubatorsa.org
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www.africabusinessassociation.org
