Maison Kébé
Gallery / 18 images
Cheikh Kébé is a bit of a genius, a star in the making. The kind of person who does a thousand things at once and is really good at all of them. At 27, he’s already got a modelling career under his belt, including two nominations for Model of the Year. In his spare time he’s trod the boards alongside Isabelle Huppert in Bérénice, the latest production from Italian playwright Romeo Castelluci (he plays the “minor” role of Titus). And finally, he’s also the artistic director of his own brand, Maison Kébé, founded two short years ago and already well on its way to icon status.
Fashion is a family affair, deep in the Kébé DNA. With a master tailor father and a mother who was always dressed to kill, his path seemed neatly traced. He started off training as an architect in Marseille, as if to emancipate himself from any familial influence. It only took a year for his natural instincts to kick in, and so the prodigal son flew to Paris to follow in his father’s footsteps at the Académie Internationale de Coupe de Paris. “It’s a school not many people know about, as it specialises in tailoring – making patterns and so on,” says Kébé. “It’s more about drawing and a bit like architecture. There wasn’t a great deal of creativity, mainly a lot of maths and technique.”
His training nevertheless propelled him to the heart of his chosen subject, allowing him to acquire the expertise essential to making luxury products. “One of my father’s first rules was that you can’t design if you don’t understand the product itself. It’s important to learn pattern-making,” says the designer. “In his workshop, where I learnt to sew, it’s an assembly line: whoever is making collars is the collar-maker, and works their way up over time.” Parallel to his studies, the young creative was also scouted as a model on the streets of Paris. He was cast in an Orange advert, ended up walking Lanvin AW18, and the whole affair marked the start of a budding career. “I did the show, and from then on everything exploded. I started doing all the fashion weeks in one season,” he adds. “It allowed me to understand backstage, the language of fashion, and all the meticulous work going on behind the scenes, which allowed me to improve my qualifications even more.”
Now, walking through the studio door of Maison Kébé, you’re halfway between a workspace and a family residence. The studio is at the end of the corridor, left-hand door next to the kitchen. This notion of home is inherent within Maison Kébé. On the one hand it’s in its history, in the story of how Cheikh’s parents met (they fell for each other during a chance fitting in Paris and returned to Dakar to start both a family and a high-end clothing line). It’s also in the influences they passed on – the patriarch’s taste for clothing’s structural rigidity, and in Cheikh’s tendency towards abundance, seen in his corseted yet voluminous dresses, or in the puffy-sleeved, heavy-buttoned lavallière-collared shirts his mother loves to wear.
“Maison Kébé was really about creating a fashion house that could be a legacy not just for me or my family, but also for Africa,” Kébé reflects. “At the moment we’re concentrating on clothes, but in the future we’ll be doing a lot more than just fashion. Furniture and crockery are things my mother likes.”
Kébé has an ambition to establish a name that stands the test of time, hence an appetite for faded, almost backward-looking imagery. Campaign shots appear like stolen images of intimate chance moments, sowing doubt as to what era the pictures were taken in. Archive-building and historicity also help create this house-in-the-making, a way of tying the brand to a sense of timelessness.
France had a big influence on my aesthetic. I visited museums and couture exhibitions, and at one point, something clicked
Maison Kébé will also carry the influences and aspirations of an under-represented territory in turmoil, one that often faces globalised challenges that threaten to reshuffle the deck in the great game that is fashion. The world of luxury – and haute couture in particular – is still under the aegis of the French capital, not only in terms of the criteria for obtaining that label but also in terms of its history and imagination. Maison Kébé wants to shake these foundations by offering a new interpretation of what makes a house – or what makes luxury – through its own bi-cultural gaze.
“I was born in Dakar and lived there for 16 years, much longer than in France, where I spent quite a bit of time,” says Kébé, reflecting on French and Senegalese culture. “France had a big influence on my aesthetic. I visited museums and couture exhibitions, and at one point, something clicked. I thought, ‘wait a minute, everything is handmade?’ Everything, or almost everything, is handmade in Africa, too.” Kébé also noticed that, like in Africa, a lot of French people have custom clothes made-to-measure, something he calls a “local reality” at home. “I took a step back and said to myself, what we consider couture [in France] is really the basis of what’s done at home. How can these practices be given international recognition?”
Ultimately, the signatures of Senegalese fashion lie less in aesthetics than in their relationship to making. Textile work is fundamental to West African customs, despite its gradual decline. “People are very skilled in terms of technique, because these are ancestral practices,” says Kébé. “Unfortunately the trades are disappearing, and fewer young people want to get involved because there aren’t enough schools and training courses, and they lack access to the resources they need to train.” Despite this, Maison Kébé is making a steadfast commitment to inscribe itself within circular production practices, collaborating solely with local artisans in order to preserve a precious cultural heritage. “In spite of everything, we’re aiming for our fabrics to be 100 per cent ‘Made in Senegal’,” continues Kébé, “from singular thread to designed piece, in order to perpetuate these skills and invest in the preservation of our environment.”
Kébé, like many of his peers, turns the constraints of his immediate surroundings to his advantage. In fact, Maison Kébé’s artistic director is managing, at a tender age, what many of our most revered designers should have already done by now: making fashion more inclusive and respectful of the traditional skills the industry was built on. Maison Kébé proposes a vision of African luxury that values and disseminates a cultural heritage while adapting it to urban trends in Europe and abroad. “It’s a battle that will take time, but I think we’re on the right track,” Kébé says. “There’s been a snowball effect recently, and a certain awareness has been created – not only for Africans, but for people from the diaspora – about the wealth we possess. We can’t sleep on it.”
Hair and make-up Madeleine Sagna, models Penda, Caroline Zren and Cheikh Kébé, styling assistant Maxime Delvaux, creative coordinator Nathan Pietrelle, backstage photographer Alain Dramé, translator and media outreach Sydney Diack
