Imane Ayissi Couture Spring 2024

Honoring Our Ancestral Wardrobes and the Beauty of the Female Form

For his Spring 2024 collection, Imane Ayissi took inspiration from the wrapped cloth worn in many parts of Africa, paying homage to both ancestral wardrobes and the beauty of the female form. The collection featured a variety of draping and layering techniques that explored the connection between the body and cloth.

Ayissi, who was born in Cameroon, is known for combining traditional dress fabrics with ancestral crafts from across Africa. In this collection, he seamlessly blended the two, using a range of materials in black and vivid jewel tones to create tone-on-tone layered silhouettes. Wide pants and pencil skirts served as a backdrop for dramatic offset bodices with train and bow details while draping added voluminous peplums and bustles to highlight the waist or hips.

Kente fabric was also incorporated into the collection, featuring in a striking combination of a pencil skirt and cropped, collarless jacket with kimono sleeves, as well as the bottom half of a halter dress. Rough-dyed, bandage-like strips of traditional woven textile were transformed into simplistically poetic gowns that had been stitched together directly on live models, their graphic bodices revealing the skin beneath, their skirts like giant fringes in motion on the runway.

Raffia, another of Ayissi's signatures, made a powerful impact in the collection. It formed a cape and skirt on one vivid fuchsia number, or graphic bow-like bundles spliced across the front of a scarlet minidress. Additionally, he adorned his bodices with circles of fabric centered by buttons, a signature he began experimenting with a few seasons ago, or with 3D appliqué flowers made with tree bark.