I must tell you a secret:
I love food.
It does not show on me, but I love food.
I love to eat it.
I love to prepare it,
to go to the market to choose the right ingredients
from small local producers
who prove to be really exceptional people each time.
I love the thought of gathering together in my sewing workshop
and create clothes,
but it often ends around a dish of couscous.
And I realize that somehow,
saying “no way” to junk food is something that matters.
There is no junk food at home because eating well –
and we are all aware of it – means respecting one’s life.
And from junk food to “junk clothes”, there’s just a step away.
A few years ago, I set up my fashion house,
and I actually decided to scavenge the trash of haute couture.
I dumpster dived.
I had the good fortune do receive the Kering Foundation award,
and the only thing that I asked for
was to be able to pick up the discarded fabrics
and make beautiful clothes with the remains.
And I realized that by creating my “Front de Mode,”
which is a store that sells fashion, trend, beautiful things,
we sell good things, yes, but we sell things that apply
at least one of the three pillars of sustainable development:
environmental, economic and social.
I think we, all the creators together, are leading a real fight,
that really is to realize a strong, intense breakthrough
so that these women who wear these clothes
can actually show that they really are
these elements of color, light and beauty of society.
At the end of the Second Empire,
there were these women, idle women,
who reinvented high society
in the context of a crisis at the imperial court.
But it was without considering something magical
which was happening and which, in any case, changed my life.
It really changed my life; I was a kid, I was just 17,
and there I saw this freedom,
the freedom that was brought by a Gabrielle Chanel,
a Balenciaga, a Schiaparelli, a Poiret ,
that suddenly set women’s bodies free.
And there is also one thing which really amazed me.
When I was 20 years old, I saw these women
who had to both carry on their shoulders
the roles of mother, housewife, executive woman,
who had to be really impeccable women and seductive
and I thought that more and more, we, fashion designers –
well, I was not yet in fashion, I was still a kid –
but the shoulders of these women, the shoulders of the jackets
were getting larger and larger.
I said to myself that anyway, it’s absolutely not faisable,
and that, at some point, we will have
to work for the reunification of her identity,
that is to say, we could be all that simultaneously, but in freedom,
in freedom, in calm and stress free.
that is to say, being these committed characters
and affirming somewhere inside us all the levels of society,
all this strength to be both these women,
but free at the same time.
I often tell my clients that you have to know
how to demand beauty, color and light.
When this tragedy happened in Bangladesh,
I went there, I flew to Bangladesh.
And I met exceptional women,
and we saw the really squalid conditions in which they live.
They work in difficult conditions but I knew
that every single one of them were saying to themselves:
“I come here and I know why I come here:
to feed my children, to feed my family.”
When we, fashion designers, we were coming saying,
for example, myself I told them:
“What fascinates me is desire;
“what fascinates me is light;
it’s not necessarily about making money;”
they did not understand all that.
As for me, I remain convinced that earning a lot more money,
always more money, has never lit any light.
I tried but it didn’t turn any light on.
I met a lot of people
who are making a lot of money through what they do,
but they are not necessarily very bright.
So, I decided that I was going to fight for only one thing:
making sustainable fashion
but without compromising aesthetics.
The more we became passionate about this commitment to aesthetics,
this commitment to style and this commitment to social issues,
the more I felt I had the duty to make clothes
that make people bright.
Desires, for me, I always say, “It is desire that reignites the light.”
In fact, desires lead to enlightenment.
You should try, it works!
I opened a workshop in the 18th district in Paris.
Personally, I call it: “The social fabric workshop.”
I was lucky to start very quickly
by being in the “in” calendar of haute couture designers,
and so making a fashion show at the Carrousel du Louvre.
But what I liked the most was when all of a sudden …
Actually I had models that were 1,80m tall,
who had perfect teeth,
who were the fashionable girls of the moment.
I remember that I was told, “Brazilian women are in fashion, we must have some. “
But personally what interested me was the fashion for human.
What did I enjoy the most?
It was to be there at the Carrousel du Louvre,
but with fat, skinny, thin, small and tall women,
to have the most beautiful of podiums.
The most beautiful of podiums is that of the street.
It’s the social podium.
It’s the democratic podium where finally, all the types of bodies can be found.
For me, desire is always present.
When we see a woman like this one, who is magnificent,
she shows something very, very deep in her garment.
But as time goes by, I realize that everywhere I go –
because I’m organizing fashion shows in prisons –
whether it be at the women’s detention house of Fleury-Mérogis,
at the Carrousel du Louvre, or at Crillon,
each time, each time,
it is this light that intensifies the garment.
It is this light that shows that this silhouette is extraordinary.
I come from far away.
I haven’t told you but I come from far away: from the Comoros.
And when I was a kid, I had an extraordinary grandmother!
She was a witch, an unbelievable witch!
In the morning, we’d get up and draw our dreams on the slate walls.
Our houses were made of sheet metal, and we had slates;
we would draw our dreams and she would tell us what they meant.
As for me, as we say in Marseille,
“Diantre! ” I dreamed that people in France lived in drawers.
Wow! I did not want to go and live in a drawer.
This was the first picture I had of my mother
who was at the window of a building.
It was the first time that I saw a building of five, six, seven floors.
So this place was a pretty magical place,
because I was raised under the Sharia law
and I learned how to read, how to write
with words that I did not understand.
I learned the Qur’an without knowing what I was saying.
At the end, I arrived in Marseille,
and discovered Boris Vian, Paul Eluard,
and then, all of a sudden, it was magic, I could understand what I was saying.
We pressed the ON-button of charisma
of the “made in France” and “made in Madagascar”,
because I didn’t know, at some point,
whether to manufacture in France or elsewhere.
Today, my fashion house for integration is located in a Go Zone.
We put 10 people on a literacy plan;
we did four fashion weeks in the favelas;
we found 17 homes for people;
and all that, with crazy laughs, beams of light,
and for one thing only: one must know how to turn poison into an elixir.
We must really revive our childhood dreams.
It’s what is the most important. We must learn to start over.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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