Diarra Bousso is a Senegalese fashion designer, creative mathematician, and multidisciplinary artist. She is the founder and creative director of Diarrablu, a fashion and lifestyle company. Bousso creates fabrics with beautiful prints using mathematical equations and transformations. She has progressed from being a Wall Street bond trader to being a creative math teacher and a fashion designer.
Bousso was born and raised in Dakar, Senegal. She attended private schools in Senegal and Norway and went on to Macalester College in Minnesota to study mathematics, economics, and statistics.
After college, Bousso worked as a bond trader on Wall Street. Initially, she liked the Wall Street job, but she was later depressed and left her job to begin her fashion career. She felt that the artist within her was dying and that she wasn’t contributing anything to her community. She also felt out of place as a black and Muslim woman on Wall Street.
Bousso’s life changed in 2012 after a terrible accident left her paralyzed with memory loss. Her mother was afraid that if she thought about Wall Street again, she might relapse into depression. So she devised a strategy. She displayed Bousso’s childhood paintings on the hospital room’s white walls and told her a story she hoped would inspire her to recover: she was a successful artist who would have a large exhibition of her work when she could walk again. She later learned that to be untrue, and she eventually made it true.
Diarrablu
Since 2013, Bousso has founded many businesses, the most notable of which is Diarrablu, with the goal of celebrating her African roots while also benefiting local artisan communities. The brand uses unique creative mathematics, such as algebraic graphs and geometric transformations, to generate recognizable prints.
The Diarrablu collections are characterized by strong structural cuts, vibrant designs, and colorful accents. The products are also noted for being adaptable, changeable, and wearable in a variety of sizes over a lengthy period of time. The majority of the products are made in Senegal.
Bousso posts the textile patterns to Instagram and asks her fans to vote on which ones they like most. The best ideas are turned into garment prototypes and re-posted for pre-orders. Cloth is printed and delivered to Senegal from all over the world.
Her family supervises the team of artisans that create the items in Senegal. She mostly designs for the seasonal fashion calendar, although monthly shipments are available all year. Bousso designs her products in such a way that she will never be left with unused materials or unsold products thanks to this environmentally conscious process.
As an environmentally conscious person, she incorporates recycled and biodegradable textiles, as well as shoes made from leather scraps. Her strategy has paid off, with the company growing by 900 percent since 2020.
Business Success
Diarra’s designs have been shown at New York and Paris Fashion Weeks, and she has also represented Senegal at World Fashion Week in Paris. Her work has been featured in publications such as Vogue, Forbes, CNN, and The New York Times. She is a major advocate for the global celebration of Africa’s cultural heritage and represents Senegal at the UN’s new art and heritage platform.
Although Diarra’s fashion business has been a success, she has had her fair share of challenges to overcome. For instance, she had no prior knowledge of the sector. In order to overcome this, she had to study and network. She went to New York and Paris fashion weeks to network and learn about supplier chains in China and Turkey.
In 2015, she moved to California and enrolled at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, where she graduated with a Masters degree in Mathematics Education. It was in this program that she learned the creative math that has come to define Diarrablu.
Bousso is currently researching and teaching creative mathematics in Silicon Valley. She combines math with art to educate students that math is more than just boring, abstract notions. Her global team manages her fashion firm and its different subsidiaries from Dakar, London, and San Francisco, where she lives.
Lessons From Diarra Busso’s Story
The story of Diarra Bousso is that of being tenacious as an entrepreneur. Despite suffering a life-threatening injury in 2012, she did not give up on her dream of becoming a fashion designer.
Networking is important in the life of an entrepreneur. When Diarra realized that she did not have enough knowledge about the fashion industry, she attended different kinds of international fashion shows to network and learn.
