XULY.Bêt
For Lamine Badian Kouyaté, fashion has never been only about making something new. Born in Bamako and based in Paris, he founded XULY.Bêt in the early 1990s, developing a distinctive language of fashion shaped by African influences, street culture, colour, movement, and the transformation of existing garments.
Long before upcycling became a central conversation in fashion, Kouyaté was working with clothes that already existed — cutting, reconstructing, combining and transforming them into something unexpected. His practice emerged from a mixture of cultures, disciplines, materials and experiences, and has continued to challenge conventional ideas of where fashion begins and ends.
What happens to a garment when it moves — from one place to another, from one person to another, from one meaning to another?
