Models stepped on to a Paris runway last week wearing sculptural gowns in African textiles by Imane Ayissi - the first and still the only designer from sub-Saharan Africa to take part in Paris's haute couture shows.
Ayissi's Autumn/Winter 2026-2027 collection "fused sculptural elegance, artisanal mastery and cultural storytelling into a personal vision of contemporary couture", wrote Jeanne-Marie Cilento, editor-in-chief of Design Art magazine.
"His work has always existed at the intersection of cultures: not as a contrast between African heritage and European technique, but as a sophisticated dialogue between two creative worlds."
Such recognition didn't come easy.
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"I have been fighting for 28 years," Ayissi told news agency Reuters in 2020 when, aged 52, he first broke into the closed circle of Paris couture houses, after repeated rejections from the governing Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode. "This time, it worked."
He insists this fight wasn't just about personal ambition, but helping promote black culture.
"I am African. I wear the jersey, I am black," he told RFI. "It's a great source of pride for me, for the whole of Africa, for Africa's friends and for all black people. It was time."
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From dancer to designer
Born in Yaoundé to a professional boxer and an Air Afrique flight attendant, Ayissi first made clothes for his mother, a former Miss Cameroon, before joining the Cameroon National Ballet.
After moving to France nearly 30 years ago, he worked as a model for some of fashion's biggest names, including Yves Saint Laurent, Givenchy, Lanvin and Pierre Cardin.
He turned to design in the 1990s, establishing his own label with a style he has called minimal and sleek, defined by "a certain mastery of fabric and form".
That mastery rests on Parisian tailoring with an unusual blend of materials: Japanese cotton and Italian silk alongside Burkinabé faso dan fani, Ghanaian kente, Nigerian adire, Ivorian kita, Malian bogolan and Cameroonian raffia.
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More than fashion
Ayissi's use of a continent-wide selection of fabrics has become his signature and he believes clothes carry both political and cultural meaning.
"It's political," he told RFI, pointing to the collapse of Cameroon's Cicam textile factory as an example of the wider problem of raw African material being shipped abroad and returning at a price few can afford.
"As long as we're not processing African materials on the continent, there's going to be a problem," he said. He argues that local manufacturing would create jobs, preserve skills and strengthen African economies.
He also feels African fashion is misunderstood in the West.
"Africa isn't a country - Africa is a continent," he says, describing a diversity of textile traditions that predate any modern idea of "African fashion".
Each fabric he chooses, he said, is a way of bringing the culture behind it - and the skill involved in making it - into the room.
That argument runs through his recently published autobiography Grande couture - a reflection on a career spent trying to persuade fashion decision-makers that African craftsmanship has its place in the exclusive world of haute couture.
In the book he compares haute couture to what he calls, in African households, "canteen fashion" - clothes families keep and hand down, not necessarily to be worn again, but to preserve the memory of a moment and a certain elegance.
According to Le Monde, his memoir also records the friction of building a couture house as an outsider. Some early clients, he writes, tried to haggle over the price of his pieces as they might with a local tailor.
Progress came slowly and mostly among French and international buyers rather than African ones, although he credits pioneers such as Malian designers Chris Seydou and Lamine Badian Kouyaté, and Paco Rabanne - who put a black model on a couture catwalk as early as 1964 - with opening the door.
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'Time is luxury'
Ayissi's definition of luxury is far removed from the image of wealth often associated with haute couture.
"Luxury is first of all respect for yourself, respect for your culture, respect for others, respect for your country, its history and its culture," he said. "Of course money is part of it, but it's not necessarily all about money."
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Instead, he argues, luxury is about craftsmanship, authenticity and patience.
"Time is luxury," he said, warning that an industry driven by speed risks forgetting "the essential" - the time needed to create and think.
He is equally convinced that technology cannot replace creativity.
"Nothing can replace the human being," he said, underlining that while artificial intelligence has its place, people must remain at the heart of creation.
Asked what advice he would give to the young African designers he sees on the global stage, including at the Africa Fashion exhibition that has been running at Paris's Quai Branly museum, he said: "Build first at home. People have always gone looking for El Dorado elsewhere [but] it's never a sure thing."
Nearly 30 years after arriving in Paris, Ayissi still produces just one couture collection a year, made in his own atelier. It remains a challenge, one he says is bigger than his own career.
"The world cannot move forward without Africa. We know that."
