African Fashion Brand Laurence Airline Is Ready for Take-off
PARIS — When Jon Batiste sang “La Bohême” with French President Emmanuel Macron at a dinner celebrating fashion designers last month, the American performer was making something of a fashion statement himself: Batiste was wearing a kimono jacket by Laurence Airline over a white shirt and tie.
Long popular with other music stars such as Nigerian singer Keziah Jones and Belgium’s Stromae, the brand based in Ivory Coast is in growth mode, with the opening of its first store in Paris and the launch of its debut women’s collection.
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Founder Laurence Chauvin-Buthaud not only incorporates traditional fabrics into her designs, but also uses locally grown cotton in her fabrics, ensuring her pieces are made in Africa from yarn to final product, unlike many other brands on the continent that use imported fabrics.
“That’s really something I’ve discovered recently,” Chauvin-Buthaud said in an interview at her store in the trendy République area of Paris.
“The cotton grown in West Africa is mostly exported, either to India or China. It’s transformed overseas and often comes back as waste in the form of [fast-fashion] clothes. That’s why it was very important to me to support local production and a short supply chain. I think a lot of people have no idea there is cotton in West Africa,” she said.
Indeed, a recent UNESCO report said that while African cotton fiber production accounted for 7.5 percent of global output in 2022, sub-Saharan countries exported more than 81 percent of the raw cotton they produced rather than transforming and using it locally.
Chauvin-Buthaud, who was born in Ivory Coast of French and Cameroonian parents, studied fashion design at Studio Berçot, the now-defunct fashion school in Paris whose alumni also include Martine Sitbon, Isabel Marant and Roland Mouret. She also holds a master’s degree from the Institut Français de la Mode.
The designer got her start in London with an eponymous label that she sold at Camden Market. After moving to Paris, she met Jones through a mutual friend and began designing stage costumes for the singer, leading to the launch of Laurence Airline in 2010 as a menswear line focused on tailor-made shirts.
These days, she shuttles between the French capital and the resort town of Grand-Bassam in Ivory Coast, where she has her workshop and adjoining boutique-gallery.
Chauvin-Buthaud works with a variety of organic, upcycled and handcrafted fabrics. These include faso dan fani, a protected woven cloth that is a symbol of national identity in Burkina Faso, and pagne baoulé from Ivory Coast, an ancestral fabric with noble origins. Pieces are embellished with traditional weaving, embroidery and beading.
She produces her own batik designs and also works with local cooperatives to encourage them to switch to organic or natural dyes. “Nowadays, sustainability is no longer a sales argument, it’s the starting point,” she said.
Additional fabrics come from LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s deadstock repurposing platform Nona Source, or from local markets that carry leftover fabrics exported from Europe.
“Whether in the choice of materials or techniques, my work is all about bringing people together and mixing cultures,” she said. “I like using traditional materials to make more contemporary products, but without denying where they come from and by actively promoting their origin and craftsmanship.”
The brand is distributed at the Aby Concept store in Abidjan, in addition to Laurence Airline’s own stores in Grand-Bassam and Paris. The new boutique, which was officially inaugurated during Paris Fashion Week, allows her to target a broader clientele.
“For me, it was important to have a place to share my work because Paris is a meeting point for people from all over the world,” she said. “The Japanese were the first to recognize my work. That’s where my collection has sold the best and for me, that was great, and it was not at all premeditated.”
She cultivates a cosmopolitan clientele.
“I think I have two types of target customer: the African diaspora, people who are proud to wear a product that is made in Africa from materials that mainly originate from there, and people who simply like what I do, who appreciate the product and who are doubly pleased that it’s made on the African continent,” she said.
Her Paris store also carries a handful of other brands rooted in craftsmanship, an opportunity to highlight traditional know-how.
“I would say that today, around 30 percent of my customers are truly interested in the production process behind the clothes,” said Chauvin-Buthaud, noting that her Ivorian clientele is more interested in supporting homegrown designers, while the Paris contingent is more sensitive to environmental credentials.
Chauvin-Buthaud produces just one collection a year, plus the occasional capsule line. Having initially set out to make a handful of women’s pieces, she soon found herself with a full collection which launched in June, with a second drop in September.
“I learned by doing – because sometimes, it’s not on purpose – that I also wanted to reach out to women, that I wanted to wear my own designs, and that I craved something more fluid,” she recalled. “Through my previous menswear designs, I noticed that women were especially sensitive to my work and that often, they were the ones pointing men in my direction.”
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