Meet the Maker – Sophia Kacimi

Sophia Kacimi spent her childhood visiting Morocco before going on to work with luxury fashion brands including Chanel and Burberry. Now she’s combining the two and creating ‘art-to-wear’ that merges the traditions of Morocco with high end fashion. And you can get one of her pieces made bespoke during 154 Art Fair

 

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of trips back to Morocco to see my dad’s family. He’s from a town in the Middle Atlas called Khenifra and moved to study in France when he was 18 where he met my mother. Remaining very close to his eleven brothers and sisters, we returned often to see them and their children during school holidays.

 

If the kitchen table is the heart of homes in Europe, it’s the sofa in Morocco. Long, low and handmade by artisans, they are traditionally covered in heavy jacquard material, often in a flamboyant colour and pattern. From eating everything from daily meals to celebration feasts, and even sleeping because many homes in rural areas don’t have bedrooms, these sofas are the place where families connect and make memories. 

 

And for me, the feel and smell of the jacquard fabrics covering them were the essence of childhood that catapulted me back to such happy memories.   

 

 

After studying business and merchandising, I started a career in luxury fashion. Living in Paris, New York and London, I worked for companies including Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Alexander McQueen and Burberry. For a long time, it was fast-paced, inspiring and rewarding. But, like many people, I had time to think during Covid and started questioning the purpose of my work. Big brands may make us dream from the outside, but internally they are finance machines working at huge volume to make identical pieces. 

 

More and more, I felt the need to turn off my phone and go back to Morocco to reconnect to the handicraft I’d been so lucky to learn about as a child. Maybe friends felt the same? Soon, I’d started organising retreats for people I knew from the fashion world at Lalla Takerkoust, a beautiful lake about an hour from Marrakech. I wanted to share with them a side of the country many people don’t get a chance to experience – and part of that was through doing workshops with artisans.

 

The more time I spent in Morocco, the more I saw the ever-growing risk to its artisanal traditions. While sons and daughters used to follow their parents to  become carpenters, leather workers or embroiderers, the younger generation don’t see a financial future in it anymore because the pay is traditionally low. At the same time, I realised so much more could be done with traditional techniques but the mindset was often set in the patterns of the past. When I asked a seamstress to make me a jacket using jacquard for instance because it evoked such happy memories, she laughed at me. She thought I was crazy to want to use ‘sofa fabric’ to dress up.

 

Luckily however, I found a tailor who agreed to make the jacket for me and when friends in London saw me wearing it, they started asking where they could get one. Zoubida was born. 

 

 

ZOUBIDA – Art to Wear

What interested me most were the many different layers to people’s reactions to the jackets. For some, they were simply beautiful one-offs. But to people with Arabic and North African heritage, they evoked the same kind of emotional memories that I had.  

 

I have three golden rules for Zoubida: everything has to be hand-made, artisans are at the core of the process and they are paid well. It’s been a huge learning process because working with artisans is the complete opposite of all I learned in the corporate world. It’s not about instant results, mutual transactions and ruthless efficiency. Instead, it’s about creating long-term relationships and trust through sharing meals and news, getting to know the craftspeople and their families. My father has been indispensable in helping me make connections to this community and it’s been a wonderful story we’ve shared together. 

 

Today, I work with craftsmen and women in Fez and Rabat and I’ve become more and more convinced that this is the future. So much modern luxury is bland in its friction-free perfection. The seasons move so fast, the branding so dominant and the saturation so overwhelming that the industry is starting to erode. We’re moving into a time however when modern luxury is about pieces that are as much culture as fashion. What artisans make, the tiny ‘errors’, the story woven into everything from the traditions of making to the person creating it, imbues the objects with so much more meaning. 

 

 

I source mostly vintage fabric for Zoubida, often the last few metres from a line that has been discontinued, and I now have contacts all over Morocco. I’m now also working with one particular artisan from Fez who has been hand-weaving silk brocade for almost seventy years and named a UNESCO Living Human Treasure. It can take him months to produce just a few metres of fabric at his workshop. 

 

The problem with having a new idea however is that people often imitate it and that happened quickly with Zoubida. I felt frustrated at first because I realised that I didn’t have a right to exclusive ownership of something that’s part of my culture. Wanting to keep pushing into new areas however, I started taking art classes and very quickly decided to use textiles in sculpture and installations. 

 

I wanted to create something that people could touch and interact with, art infused with play because it connects us across language, cultures and different life experiences. And while animals and children universally play, so many adults often forget to and I wanted to create spaces that encouraged them to experiment a little. 

 

 

SOPHIA KACIMI AT THE 1-54 MARRAKECH ART FAIR

Like my fashion, jacquard is a theme of my art. For 154 last year for instance, I created a huge textile chess set made by artisans. For my installation at El Fenn this year, I’ve created large-scale dolls made of stackable, jacquard-covered cubes that people can rearrange to make new shapes. They’re a bit like those books kids often have with pictures of animals or people that can be flipped to rearrange the head, body and feet. We’re living in a world filled with heavy news right now so my aim is to connect people to light, warmth and joy. And maybe some of their own childhood memories. 

 

 

I’m also excited to be hosting a pop-up salon where people can have a bespoke Zoubida jacket made to order. I’ll be bringing my huge catalogue of fabric and people can let their imaginations run wild as we co-design a piece that is guaranteed to be absolutely unique. 

 

Because for me now, this is the pure essence of real luxury. It’s fashion as a story, with roots into traditions that run deep, and created by the very human skills of real people.

 

:: Sophia was the winner of the 2024 Craft & Commitment Prize, and the 2025 Creative Entrepreneur Prize, from Institut du Monde Arabe. Find out more about Zoubida

 

 

Take a look at the three exhibitions that El Fenn will be hosting during the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.