occupation: musician and artist

“[My favorite thing about fashion is] its capacity to transform. For instance, moldy ducklings into randy swans, and vice versa.” Fatima Al Qadiri

Fatima was born in Senegal and grew up in Kuwait. Her adolescence in the early ’90s was right after the first Gulf War and during a very conservative time where she and her sister were in the house and had nothing else to do but draw and make music. “My entire adolescence was like an internal existence, because we couldn’t go out. I can count on both hands the amount of times I went out alone, it was really hardcore.” Fatima remembers reading a lot of avant garde magazines like I.D. and The Face, and attributes some of that exposure to her present interest in fashion. A minimalist in every sense of the word, from her understated and modest demeanor to her chicer than chic short haircut, those insular days seems to have contributed to creating a thoroughbred of taste. The feeling of always being an outsider in her home country has worked for her style-wise. Fatima has one of the best-kept secrets around – she is able to uncover some of the most state-of-the-art designer pieces in her hometown of Kuwait for 90% off because they are underappreciated there. Thus her couture Yohji Yamamoto skirt for $20, that someone stopped her on the street about, alerting her to the that fact that there were only 10 to 15 ever made. I love her sense of the impact that the subtleties make, like buttoning her shirt all the way up, not wearing jewelry, and her appreciation of the ultimate WilliWear trench (she is a first on SLU to have something from this design icon). Fatima achieves in her dress, in my opinion, the perfection of balance between feminine and masculine and thus is an emblem of our times in her dashing androgyny. I can’t help but see the comparison of how equally iconic her youth was as a teenager, locked indoors in a Middle Eastern war-torn country.

To learn more about Fatima, go to the captions on the detailed page.

If you like Fatima, you might also enjoy Malcolm Harris, Adia Tischler, Lux Leekley,
or Erik Bergrin.