“I opened my first store in 2013, started trying to recruit from different design schools like you would normally do and just looking out for factories who could develop my collections. And I had a really hard time and it was like an awakening for me,” she said.
“It was more at first just a fashion school that I was thinking about launching and then as I went through and I looked at the ecosystem and I looked at all the different things that I needed support in, I thought about having a hub that would just have different components and support younger generations,” Nzinga Sy recalled.The campus, an hour outside the Senegalese capital, was formally inaugurated a year ago and began offering courses in February.
Thanks to word-of-mouth, Nzinga Sy recruited an international faculty with teachers from Senegal, the U.S., The Gambia, Canada and France. “It’s just been really a big melting pot of different people who are experts at a very high level,” she said. “I believe I was the first to kind of dabble into luxury ready-to-wear in Senegal,” she said. “The conclusion was that there was a certain niche in Senegal, across West Africa, of people who really, really wanted to buy luxury African fashion, but it was a very small niche.”
Nzinga Sy showed her new collection on Saturday as part of Dakar Fashion Week and will present her designs at