AT WORK WITH: RYM BEYDOUN

Rym Beydoun spent much of her childhood making art, attending classes where most of her peers were in their 50s. “We would go and paint by the sea,” the fashion designer says, reminiscing about growing up in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. 

They were taught to use natural materials, incorporating sand, shells, beads and raffia. The imaginative freedom would come to be a formative experience. “From a very young age I remember feeling grateful for both being an artist and being from Africa,” she says. “It was really at the core of my upbringing.” 

Beydoun is speaking from Abidjan, where she returned to live last year after more than a decade traveling between Beirut and Ivory Coast. Her roots run deep in both countries. She left Abidjan in 1999 with her mother and siblings for Beirut following a coup in Ivory Coast—a reversal of her father’s journey in the 1970s, when he departed a wartorn Lebanon at the age of 14 for Abidjan.¹ 

Super Yaya, the cult fashion brand that Beydoun founded in 2015, draws heavily on Ivorian culture. “I wanted to translate what it means to dress in a West African way,” she explains. “Here people still buy fabric and do things themselves. There’s this DIY culture.” After studying fashion design at London’s Central Saint Martins—having originally planned to study fine art—and spending part of her placement year back in Abidjan working with tailors and in wax print factories, Beydoun set up an online shop for her studio. Customers could choose between different styles and materials to create garments which were then made to order. The approach kept overheads low and allowed her to “test the market.” 

“The starting point is the textile: It can become a chair… It can be a bag, and it can be a shoe.”

Next came T-shirts, emblazoned with slogans like “100% Africosmic” and “Super Yaya 100%.” (“Yaya” is a common name for boys in Abidjan but is used by Beydoun in a unisex context. The “100%” is a nod to the exaggerated tone of Ivorian advertising.) A bold branding exercise, the T-shirts signaled the “merging of fashion with popular culture” that has become a distinctive part of her brand since. Stockists like Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Opening Ceremony came calling, and their success allowed Beydoun to scale up to producing full collections. These slick, offbeat garments featured fabrics sourced in Abidjan’s markets, which were often hand-dyed and printed in Ivory Coast, before being sent for production in Beirut, where Beydoun has a studio. 

From the start, Super Yaya’s collections have had a distinct vernacular—absorbing the varied sights and sartorial modes of Lebanon and Ivory Coast to create clothes that are ambitiously silhouetted and slyly elegant. They prioritize texture (ruffles, pleats, cutouts, ruching) and juicy color combinations, taking inspiration from African modernist architecture to ’90s photography. For the past couple of seasons, they have largely been made from bazin, a type of hand-dyed West African cotton known for its stiff, damask sheen. 

As well as reflecting her approach to design, Super Yaya has also been shaped by Beydoun’s belief in taking things as they come, or, as she terms it, practicing an “acceptance philosophy.” She was among the thousands of people injured in the devastating explosion in Beirut in 2020 and endured a long, bedbound convalescence.² Yet Beydoun is circumspect. 

“I was really burnt out before the blast. I really wanted to take a break . . . I needed to understand why I was doing what I was doing,” she says. Her long recovery gave her the opportunity to reset. “I’m not going to say that it was peaceful and restful, because it was a very painful experience, but I thought I would never have another time in my life to sit for six months in bed and play with the cats.” Later she loops back to correct herself. “I mean, I say that I stopped working, but it’s not true . . . there are pictures of me in bed packing boxes.” 

Still, being confined to one room gave Beydoun precious pockets of time to do nothing and to adjust to her new physical needs. “I had to learn how to dress again,” she says. “I still had to look good in my clothes.” In 2022, she released “Recovery,” her first collection since the explosion, which riffs on a 1999 Louise Bourgeois artwork of the same name. The clothes are audacious, sexy and beautifully crafted while still being easy to wear: lemon posset yellows and pre-dawn blues; elaborate basket-woven skirts and shirred trousers—designs at once playful and sophisticated. 

Operating outside of the traditional fashion centers of London, Milan, Paris and New York is central to Beydoun’s work (“Chanel—I don’t think they needed me,” she says dryly at one point), but it’s also not without its challenges. The recent political instability in Lebanon precipitated her move back to Ivory Coast. “A war can break out, we’re all nervous. This week alone, [there were] two days my workers couldn’t come because they were afraid on the road,” she says.

Aside from practical problems, like sourcing fabric and zippers, working from Beirut and Abidjan does limit the kind of casual, productive encounters one can have with a wider community of peers, buyers and the press. Super Yaya now employs 14 people full-time and five people part-time, and presents a collection each year in Paris during Men’s Fashion Week, but for the rest of the year, it’s a more isolated experience. “It does work in your favor sometimes,” Beydoun considers. “It’s slow growth, but it’s an underground brand.” They don’t pay for press and the celebrities pictured in Super Yaya—Kendall Jenner, Solange Knowles and Alexa Chung—have all bought the pieces for themselves. The brand has expanded on Beydoun’s own terms, constantly shifting and flexing in slightly different directions. 

It’s been almost 10 years since Beydoun founded Super Yaya and she is itching for the next stage. When we speak, she is deep into archival research, looking at daily modes of West African dress and textiles from the 1980s and ’90s: “The type of things that you never find online, and we don’t have a library to search for these images.” She’s talking to designers like Aïssa Dione, a Senegalese textiles maven who is best known for creating exquisite upholstery, and she’s also dipping a toe back into the art world via works like Super Limbo, a large-scale installation of woven panels of calico cotton staged in a deserted mall during the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial in the United Arab Emirates.³ Last year, Beydoun also collaborated on a four-piece capsule collection for Gohar World, the surrealist tableware brand of celebrated food artist Laila Gohar.   

“The starting point is the textile: It can become a chair, it can become a shirt, it can be womenswear, or it can be menswear. It can be a bag, and it can be a shoe,” Beydoun explains. “It’s all literal material.” 

In this way, Beydoun’s label becomes a vast umbrella—or even a billowing canopy—encompassing an ever-shifting number of projects and possibilities beneath it: “Super Yaya was intended to be able to showcase any kind of product. In the beginning, I went so far as to think that it could even be on rice, you know?” She might not be on supermarket shelves yet, but with Beydoun’s vision, it feels like it wouldn’t be all that surprising.