Glenna Gordon
27 October 2007
Latif Madoi got his scissors from an old lady who couldn't pay for her daughter's sewing and design lessons. The German Solingen size ten scissors are at least 50-years-old, a heavy steel with a dark patina - two thick shanks held together by a sturdy bolt.
They're probably the only such pair in Kawempe, maybe in Uganda, probably an artifact of a colonial tailor left town.
"You sew what you've cut, so if you cut a wrong thing you stitch a wrong thing," says Latif. "So to have a good design it has to come from the cutting itself."
Latif has cut designs for all of Uganda's top musicians and celebrities: Miss Uganda, Blu*3, Chameleone, Bebe Cool, Bobi Wine, and others from all over Africa, including the recently departed Lucky Dube.
These days his scissors rarely hang on the sturdy nail jutting out of the wall, their resting spot. Latif is busy cutting 10 outfits - five male and five female - for the FIMA, International Fashion Show in Africa, awards and competition next month in Niger.
Latif says the competition is about "recognition." He's already busy in Uganda: running a fashion and design school that churns out caps and jumpsuits aplenty, dressing every celebrity in town when they need something that suits his style, all the while promoting himself and refining his art.
FIMA, meanwhile, is "a framework to express beauty, as well as assert the leading cultural values in Africa and the world," according to the chairman Seidnaly Sidhamed alias Alphadi. Latif is ready to cut through the competition and show off his goods.
"These scissors here, they cut any kind of fabric, any kind of material," says Latif. The scissors, he says, are a godsend, since he isn't just using cotton. His palette includes denim, canvas, suede, leather, bark cloth, and everything from velvet to goat hide. His urban hip-hop meets African cool look was exactly what they wanted in Niger, since this year's theme is street fashion. Latif's entries range from urban haute couture to sexy camouflage vixen to plush thug street wear.
In his studio in Kawempe, two small rooms covered in photos of his work, posters of musicians he has dressed, a goat head, a pink and gold metallic clock, and lots of tagging, he pulls out one of the fully finished outfits. It's a green suit gone sexy rogue: short shorts in army green rimmed with brown camouflage and metallic studs, a matching fitted coat in green with huge flared cuffs in camo. A centrepiece belt shows Latif's careful handiwork. It sits just below the chest, with two carefully stitched and symmetrical pockets, reverse embellish, and nifty hooks end in a cute corset.
"I used my perfect scissors to cut all this. They're the strongest," he says. "I've finished the females outfits," which means he has a week left to finish the men's outfits before he has to drop them off at the French Embassy in Kampala to be shipped to Niger ahead of the competition.
If he wins, he'll get to take a three month fashion course in Paris, but regardless of how he places, all the competitors get to go to Paris for three days before the contest for a bit of instruction and the first press conference.
He'll be eager to get back his small Kawempe studio though, filled with dozens of machines, his friends and students, and the market he most wants to wear his products.
More than anything, he wants to see Ugandans wearing his designs. He cringes at cheap Chinese imports and the high prices of American clothes. "We want to show people that Ugandans can make good things, he says." Latif says he won't carry his nice scissors to Niger. "You could easily lose it," he says. But he hopes he won't lose FIMA.
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