Marie-Madeleine Diouf recalls how it all started: her love affair with indigo. Growing up in Parcelles Assainies, a working-class neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, she would gravitate to traditional dance in her after-school programs. That meant raiding her mother’s closet for vintage wraps—and thus indigo fabrics, prized in her family’s Serer culture. “I was 7, 8 years old,” Diouf says, “and ever since then, I’ve seen life in blue.”
For 15 years, Diouf worked as a medical administrator. On the side, with a cheap sewing machine, she made clothes that she took on days off to Banjul, the capital of neighboring Gambia, to sell door-to-door. Then, in 2015, she made the jump. Now, as the owner of NuNu Design by DK, she’s one of the bright stars in Dakar’s art and fashion scene, where craft and innovation, cultural heritage, and contemporary design combine to thrilling effect.
Across West Africa, textile and ornament traditions and techniques keep fashion dynamic in daily life—just ask any street photographer. But some cities boast an especially active interplay of lineage and cutting-edge creation. Dakar is a place of constant exchange, with direct flights connecting it to Paris and New York for visitors and the entrepreneurial Senegalese diaspora. It’s also a knowledge hub with solid universities and Africa’s most respected art biennial.
All this unfolds on a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, yielding beautiful vistas (and not-so-gorgeous traffic bottlenecks), with new neighborhoods sprouting inland as the city expands. The peninsula hooks to create a harbor around which Dakar first grew during the French colonial era, then after independence, in 1960. Here you’ll find banks, ministries, and boutiques like Diouf’s showroom, as well as the Museum of Black Civilizations and the ferry to historic Gorée Island.
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