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Fusing art and numbers: How this Senegalese fashion designer designs clothes from math equations

A fashion designer from Senegal is making waves in Africa for her designs derived from math equations.
According to a report by American news website Channel 3000, Diarra Bousso Gueye is part of a creative wave of designers who are innovating the up-and-coming African fashion. She says she credits her success to mathematics.
Before she became of the biggest names in African fashion, Gueye was an algebra teacher in Senegal. She also worked at an investment bank in Wall Street, New York, then later on moved to the trading industry.
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While she was passionate about numbers, she was also in love with design—creating clothes for her dolls when she was a young girl from scratch. She also started a fashion blog—on the side of her full-time banking job—where she tackled fashion inspiration she observed in New York.
In an interview with Channel 3000, she said she was grading papers when she first thought of using the equations that she taught her students to create prints for the clothes she designs.
She then began using mathematical equations in designing the products of her brand—called Diarrablu—such as swimsuits, kimonos, and dresses. She employed such as geometric and quadratic concepts to create her clothes in bold colors, and some of her works were even inspired as well by exponential functions.
“I am proud to call myself a creative mathematician and I spend my day doing or teaching math. As a result, all my creations have this DNA. My work is fully focused on the use of mathematics for the creative process,” Channel 3000 quoted her as saying.
Today, she is not only a passionate math teacher in Silicon Valley, she is also a successful African designer in Senegal. She goes back and forth the US and West Africa to juggle her two professions. Currently, she is organizing fashion events in various countries where she showcases African fashion, while taking up her Master’s Degree in Mathematics at Stanford University.
In the data released by strategic market research provider Euromonitor, Africa’s apparel and footwear market is worth $31 billion—with a lot of famous personalities promoting their products, such as Beyoncé. Gueye’s influence on the continent continues to swell, and she hopes to enter into other partnerships with more designers on the continent.
“I am happy that African designers are taking stronger ownership of the narrative and I encourage us to keep writing our own stories and create our own validation,” she said in an interview with Channel 3000.
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