Tailor-Made: The Continuing Saga
These dresses began in the sensory overload that is a Dakar market—Shacks and stands spilling over with fabrics, vendors calling out prices and marriage proposals, women weaving through with trays of bananas on their heads, street children grabbing your hands, taxis sneezing exhaust and kicking up dust on the cracked roads, all of it enough to simultaneously suck you in and make you want to get away as quickly as you can.
But ever since my first success at having a dress tailor-made, it became impossible for me to walk away from a market without at least a couple meters of fabric. It didn’t help my habit that women in Dakar wear the most elegant and vibrantly colored dresses I’ve ever seen, which basically provided a garden-of-eden level of temptation to have my own stuff made.
I accumulated the fabric at first haphazardly—a couple yards of vibrant blue and green pieces that were going for 75 cents each in a pile of scraps outside a fabric shop, a few more of an orange and red number, some blue plaid that I decided I could not go on living without, and an insane brown-blue-orange pattern that the maid at my homestay gave me.
Eventually though, I realized that the stack of brightly colored clothing-materials in my bedroom was reaching epic proportions, and with my return to the U.S. looming, I finally bagged it all up and headed to my host mom’s tailor. I handed over the fabric, a few grainy pictures printed from American clothing websites for him to use as models, and crossed my fingers that somehow this middle-aged Senegalese man would be able to put on his hipster-hat and make me some dresses that would go well with messenger bags and chuck taylors.
Amazingly, he did just that. I can’t tell you how incredibly pleased I am with the dresses he made me, which are a cool fusion of Senegalese fabrics and western style, and are probably the best souvenirs I could have come away with. Plus, on the day I went to pick up my four dresses and a shirt (total cost: $40…nuts), I ended up sitting with him for an hour while he fiddled with zippers and made final size adjustments, and we just talked. My french is still a stumbling mess, but it didn’t matter. We chatted about his work, his family, how much he loves American muslims (‘Ils sont vraiment jolis,’ he kept saying. approximate translation: ‘they are truly attractive.’ I’m not exactly sure what he was going for there…). And at the end of it all, I walked away some fantastic new clothes.
So now, without further ado, meet my Senegalese wardrobe (and some of the cool designs my friends had made as well).
(Look! her bag is the same fabric as my dress. nutty)
FIN.
