MAKTUB
He says my mother gave birth to me under her sewing table. I arrived so quickly that she didn’t have time to get up. She took the scissors she’d been working with to cut the umbilical cord. He says I don’t know whether to tell people this, but this collection is a tribute to childhood. I grew up among women in Imzouren, in northern Morocco. He says I met my father at Barce- lone airport when I was four. I’d never seen him before; when he left to look for work in Spain, I was seven months old.
He too was a dressmaker. I grew up with the sound of sewing machines and played with fabric scraps. I know that every color is an emotion, fabrics resurrect precise memories, textures connect us to nostalgia, memory embroiders and a cotton thread is always the thread of a story. He says sewing is always about memories. He says that when I work, I try to understand my relationship with materials, cuts and volumes – and that’s why I work with my childhood. It’s to my childhood that I give meaning, my own and that of those around me, theirs and those of those who came before us.
He says I didn’t talk much as a child, but I drew all the time, and that’s how I got into art school, and today that’s where I come from, and that’s how I see couture: it’s a reading of the world, as it is, and at the same time a proposal, as I want it to be. It’s the whole world that I want to put into a collection, and it’s the whole world that I’m addressing.
And what’s striking about Karim Adduchi – the way he is and what he invents – is the elegance of his lightness. He looks at bodies, all bodies, and invents for them a way of inhabiting the world. He looks at women, all women, and sees that it’s not a question of hiding or showing, but of finding the strength to be one’s own center of perception. He imagines clothes that would be allies, that would be supports, that would celebrate power, endurance – as well as failure.
Karim Adduchi’s work is an elaboration of an aesthetic of softness, one that transcends the boundaries of fashion and gender to speak synesthetically to what we need – love. Not the desire to possess by dispossessing the other of anything – but love. Candide, radiant, slicing and destabilizing, without trying to be brusque, and describing his work in words always comes down to this: speaking softly, unafraid of surprise, complexity or weakness.
Karim Adduchi’s Mektoub – what is written, what will happen – is his way of saying our destinies are interwoven, it’s already happened.
And it’s a miracle of beauty.
VIRGINIE DESPENTES
Cette publication est également disponible en :
