How to rethink your emotional attachment to clothes (w/ Diarra Bousso)

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1:34this is how to be a better human i'm your host chris duffy today we're going to be talking about fashion we're going to be talking about math we're going to be talking about west africa and norway and artificial intelligence and as unlikely as it sounds we're going to cover all of those topics in the same conversation with one person and that is because our guest today is the multifaceted multi-talented, Diara Busso. Diara is the founder of the fashion technology company Diara Blue, but as she explains in her TED Talk, this was not a career that she expected. I actually didn't intend to work in fashion.

2:11I started my carry on Wall Street in my early 20s, was obsessed with being rich, and back then I probably preferred fashion brands that supported my wasteful shopping habits. But in July 2012, my life completely changed after a life-threatening accident that left me in a coma. When I woke up in a blank room with a blank memory, I had the opportunity to start over. I no longer saw life as a race to just consume and accumulate things, but rather felt a deep desire for meaning. and impact. As I recovered, surrounded by my family in Senegal, I was fascinated by a culture of longevity where, philosophically, it's not really about the word sustainability, but the active act of sustaining everything we love.

3:12Traditions, resources, culture. See, growing up, getting a new outfit was not really an impulse purchase. but rather a very intentional process rooted in love and longevity. You'd go to the market, get just the right amount of fabric needed, and then work with a local artisan to get your clothes made to order. Styles were often convertible and adjustable so as to fit you across different body changes over time. And then at the end, you'd just pass it down to someone else. The concept of waste wasn't even conceivable for us. See, sustaining things is not just what we do. It's a love language about who we are.

4:00I decided to channel this inspiration to create my own fashion brand, Diarro Blue, with the goal to produce clothing more responsibly. What does it take to create clothing that is beautiful and responsible? We're going to be getting real deep on that question today on the show.

4:21Hi, everyone. I'm Dior Busso. I'm the founder of Dior Blue, a fashion and lifestyle brand rooted in sustainability. And my work focuses on how to use technology and humanize artistic expression. Can you tell us about your background and what got you interested in sustainable design in the first place? I grew up in Senegal. That's where my family is from. And I grew up in an artisan family. So like my dad was a banker, but he was the only one who's ever gone to school in his whole family at the time, like elementary school. And he made it as far as, you know, being a banker and being very successful.

4:52But all his siblings, all my cousins work in the artisan world, especially leather. So I grew up around the world of sustainability. As a matter of fact, in my culture, there's no word for it. The closest thing is maybe life, or common sense, because you just, if you love something, you protect it. So I grew up seeing resources. I grew up seeing people, you know, producing everything by hand, reusing every single part of like, if you want to make a leather bag, you use the cow skin for the bag, the meat is using for food, the horns are going to be used for something like nothing goes to waste.

5:23And things were also made to last for a very long time. So like if a dress was being made, it was made intentionally to be size inclusive and adjustable. So you'd have extra straps or elastics so that you could pass it across different people or generations. I would say sustainability was just something natural in terms of how I was raised. And growing up, I always wanted to be in the creative world, but I didn't have the courage. So I went and pursued finance and math because I was like, if my dad is so successful and he's a banker, if I am a banker, I will be successful too. So kind of buried my creative dreams and pursued that route and started on Wall Street.

5:57And I think I went to a quarter life crisis for five years between 23 and 28, where I became a painter. Then I became a photographer. Then I became a world traveler. Then I became a cook. And then I became a math teacher. And I was like, this is it. This is what I want to do. And little did I know being in the math classroom and teaching math is what would connect my two words in terms of science and art. And I started using math to design textiles. And that's what led to this company. Tell me more about the connection between math and textiles, because I think that's often really surprising for people.

6:28At the end of the day, textiles are just patterns, right? Art, drawing, sketches, everything is just a pattern. And I think for me, who didn't get trained formally in the art world, I got trained very formally in the math world and geometry and all of that stuff. But even as a student or in finance, math was very much like related to the finance world. I never saw it as a creative thing. And then I became a teacher and I realized that most students absolutely hate math. My first job was an assistant. I was working in a school where all the kids who were failing math from sixth to twelfth grade would come to me instead of going to math class.

6:59So I would like help them with their homework. And I started realizing they don't hate math. They hate how they are taught. when you make it fun and make it creative and it's like you know if somebody likes music I'll be like okay let's look at the lyrics of this song and count and look at the pattern there if somebody likes drawing okay let's look at this flower and see what equations create this curve so I kind of just found a way to gamify the whole math experience and in the process of doing so I realized that I was teaching myself how to connect math to patterns and on my free time I would use the same math I was teaching them to create shapes it's how it started it was honestly just for fun.

7:31And the intention was to help kids like math better. And then it turned into using it for work. I taught fifth grade at an elementary school. And I loved being in school as a student, but I always just really struggled with math. That was my hardest topic. And I was surprised as a teacher to find that actually math was my favorite thing to teach because the fact that I had struggled with it made it so that I really understood like how to explain it because if I could understand it then they would too there's something really nice about how with math the pieces click into place and you understand like this builds on this builds on this yeah it's kind of like a puzzle I think the satisfaction of understanding something is universal right like when somebody struggles with something and then they find a way to make it click it's like when you're solving a puzzle for hours and then finally it works and they match it's such a big feeling and I think I was able to get them to feel that way with art it's like connecting math to patterns and art and I think I just became addicted to that and my kids loved it as well so it just became a thing like on the weekends I would just sit and sketch and use equation to get them to work so I would show them on next Monday at school to get them excited and all these patterns I was creating on the side were actually really beautiful so I started posting them on social media on Instagram and just sharing them with people and they were voting and saying oh, we want this in a dress and we want this in pants.

8:52I was like, oh, wait, what? Are you saying that I should go back to the fashion thing? But yeah, that's kind of what started this whole thing. So Diara Blue, you do things really differently than other fashion companies. And part of that comes from your unique background, both in math and in having grown up West Africa and Senegal, and then also in Norway. But part of it is also just, I think you have this value of thinking about things that are built to last and future mindedness. And you highlight in a way that many other people don't how making something easy doesn't actually mean you're making it better.

9:33I think often fashion is very easy, but it's not better. Yeah, I think that in fashion, we've kind of trained ourselves for convenience. like you know the fastest way you can get something producing in mass creating so many sizes for example like you'll have a dress going from size 0 to 14 and each numerical size is a new iteration and just creating so much like ease but it's actually not easy at all it's easy for the customer but it's a very complicated system it's very wasteful i think it's a lazy system because it's a system that has existed and it's easy to plug into but people don't really questioning.

10:09And, you know, why are there four seasons a year? They do fall, winter, spring, summer. Why are there two seasons? Why are there four seasons? Why are they like everything is actually not a rule? Like you can change it and you can do it your own way. I think for me, it's because I didn't come from this industry. I didn't even know what these rules were. One of my favorite quotes from Picasso is learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. But for me, I'm like, I don't even know the rules. So I break them all the time. So it's not even like I'm trying to be rebellious. I genuinely don't know.

10:38And I'm really embracing it now because I think in the beginning I had a little bit of imposter syndrome because I'm like, oh, I didn't go to fashion school. I'm not based in New York. I don't have art background. And then I started realizing it's a huge strength because I'm starting from a blank canvas and I'm challenging so many things. And only after I started getting noticed by the press or the buyers, I realized, oh, this is really special. But there's a side of just like having values around waste and not being wasteful and preserving things. But also, I think it's just being super naive from the start because I didn't really have a mold to follow.

11:10And that ended up being my biggest strength because I will question absolutely anything. And sometimes people who are like, you know, heritage fashion brands or people who are from the industry will question it at first, be like, why not? And that's not just in fashion, but with any system. The approach that you take is a really important one, regardless of the industry that we're in. to say like, well, what would it be like if we rethought this? And why do we do it the way that we do? What if we did something that was better for you, for the environment, for the community, rather than just the least frictionless thing?

11:43So it's interesting to me to have that conversation with you because you're currently based in Silicon Valley. And I think you're in a part of the world that many of us associate, I certainly strongly associate with a place that is trying to remove as much friction as possible from life, right? Everything is like one click, it immediately arrives. Things show up really fast. And you're kind of not in that mindset at all. So tell me about that, being a rebel in the place that you're in. So I went to Stanford to get my master's in math education. And it's funny because coming from Wall Street, everybody who wanted to go to Stanford wanted to go to the business school and build a massive company and raise tons of capital and all of it.

12:19So that's the first thing I did. I actually applied to business school because I wanted to just be able to show up on LinkedIn and feel cool. And when I got in, I realized actually I'm not doing this for the right reason because I'm going back to the world that I didn't want to be part of to begin with which was this Wall Street fast-paced life so I turned it down at the last minute and it created this massive crisis in my family like oh my god you're so spoiled blah blah blah it's like no it's not for me and a year later I realized I wanted to be a teacher so I went to Stanford for teaching so I still went to the business school and took a few classes same for the design school and I remember in the business school there was a pitch competition where I was working on D.R.

12:54Blue at the time it was not a company yet and at the end of it, the professor was like really supportive because like, you know, I had one of the best results in the competition and it was really good. And he's like, the next step is to go and raise a lot of capital and build this factory and stuff. I was like, I'm not doing that. And he was kind of disappointed. And I went like, no, I'm going to go and be a math teacher and keep learning because the more I'm going to learn from the outside, the more I'm going to, I have my whole life to build this. And I think that was so weird. It almost felt like I was wasting his time to be doing all of these classes to say, no, I'm not going to pursue it right away and raise a ton of money.

13:28And it's like, the moment I raise money right away, it's going to be very easy for me to make mistakes because I'm not spending my money. Like I can waste somebody else's money and make these mistakes, but I really want to keep learning because I'm not trying to just build a fashion company. I'm trying to create change, like structural change in the industry that I'm learning from the outside. And that's not going to follow a blueprint, this blueprint of raising tons of money, starting a factory, producing inventories, stocking it somewhere. Like I'm not doing that. And I went and pursued the teaching route.

13:56But in my heart, I knew I was going to pursue this eventually. So I'm teaching in the daytime. And in the evening, I'm using my equations to create prototypes and sending them on Instagram. And every 24 hours, I'm getting all this feedback, literally, like of what I should produce. I learned how to design textiles the formal way. So I would create these patterns, show them, and I'll actually get them printed in factories. And I would buy all the textiles and send them to our factory in Senegal, but not produce anything. The opportunity for inventory was limitless, but there was no cost. All I had was raw materials.

14:27Little did I know that business model was going to be what made my company successful. And I still haven't raised any funding. And we're still cash flow positive five years later. And it's because I don't have inventory. Like a typical fashion brand spends a lot of cash flow on inventory. I can launch a collection today. If it flops, I definitely don't lose anything. I'll be like, okay, fine, let's launch something new next week. Like that whole model allowed me to, you know, get into massive partnerships with other retailers and create a very risk-free way of working with us because it's all drop ship.

14:56Like you can order something on our website today and then you receive it in seven days, but it actually gets made tomorrow. We operate like a restaurant. So everything is modular. It's not only a really effective business model for making it so that you're able to have this successful business, but it's also a business model that creates a lot less waste. What we don't realize that waste is not just about the environment and it's also financial. Like if you think about it, you're wasting money. and the industry is built into wasting money. Like you're meant to overproduce, to sell a certain percentage because the rest is going to go unmarked down or get sent to the trash or something.

15:30So it's built into the process. So you're basically making a business model in which you have a waste factor, which is ridiculous to me. It's like, why would you do that? Versus the model we've built is super reactive. So when I think about a supply chain, we don't have a supply chain. Actually, we have a demand chain. So everything we do starts from the demand. And as a result, everything we produce, we're not guessing anything. Like we produce what we produce today because it was demanded yesterday or last week. So the whole operations work this way. And the factory, when I started in the car and now it works in partner factories, it's like a restaurant.

16:05We buy all the raw materials based on what we see in the crowdsourcing that people like. And we leave it there. And every day, like you go to a restaurant, you can order chicken parmigiano. You can get a Caesar salad. You can get any assortment of it. But the materials stay the same. The difference with the restaurant is that our materials are not perishable. They are not fabrics. I mean, there's always going to be waste from like scraps and cutting and stuff. But we don't have the typical waste in this industry where it's like one garbage truck full of clothes goes to a landfill every second.

16:31That's how this fashion industry works. We don't have to deal with that both financially and environmentally because we are being responsive. And community is also super important because in this whole process, you have to build relationships with your customers. You're constantly asking them what they want to see. It's also humbling because as a designer, I'm like, oh, I have this. I'm so smart. I have all these ideas. You put it out there and they're like, no, we hate it. I'm really glad you're telling me right now before I spend all this money on it. Thank you. I'll do something else and I'll come back to you.

16:57It's very humbling. And I really like that experience, too. We're going to take a quick break for ads and then we will be right back.

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19:22And we are back. We're talking with Diara Busso of Diara Blue about her clothes, her company and her process. For the people who are listening on the podcast, can you describe what the style of your clothes is or what they look like? Yeah, I would say in the beginning, it was really much like I was stuck on Wall Street and I was daydreaming of being on vacation. That's how this whole thing started, like dreams. So I would say most of the collection was very resort focused at first. Now it's full, ready to wear. But at first it was like caftans. And if you watch the White Lotus, what all those rich ladies are wearing in these hotels and are just super relaxed and everything is loose and flowy and you can eat everything you want.

20:02And you just look great in all of it. And you just look rich and relaxed all the time. That is the brand's aesthetic, literally. I think White Lotus is the way to visualize it. I come from a culture that's very colorful. So like prints are important. Everything is a print. I mean, we have a few solid pieces, but even when it's solid, it has a little bit of texture or something exciting to it. But Senegalese people are not plain at all. We like color. We like prints. We like geometry. We like flowers. So, like, we have a lot of that. And I would say it's just clothes that make you feel beautiful and happy.

20:34Like, every time I see someone wearing our clothes or just I am wearing it, it just lifts my mood because there's such a beautiful energy behind it. It has to be beautiful because people vote and we know what they want. They're really beautiful works of art. But also I think the flexibility of them, that they aren't just for one size and that they are designed to last for you. You know, sometimes you have like a piece that you buy that it's a really well made, say, a sweater and you're going to keep this for years. But if your body changes, the sweater is probably not going to fit you as well.

21:02And I think you have a really interesting thing, which is also very much embedded in Senegalese fashion, which is that because they're flowing and because they're not tightly fitted, they can accommodate different changes in your body. And if you need to be warmer or more covered or if you need to be looser and less covered, they're able to adjust. I think there's something called emotional sustainability that we don't think about or like emotional durability. and it's like when you buy something and you get attached to it to wear it longer and I think the more your clothes make you feel happy and good about yourself the more that's going to happen like if you buy a set of jeans that are a size two and you get pregnant and they can't close anymore and the zipper breaks the emotions around the jeans are really bad like you just feel bad about it's like the jeans just insulted you but if you have a dress that no matter what your body does it just embraces you there's this emotional thing of like this is my friend like this dress is my friend and I just love here and we think about that when designing when I'm designing things I mean we have outfit models and everything but I like to me and my mom try everything on and see how we live in it like there are clothes that I wear for like six months before actually putting them in the line just to see how I feel how do they wash what is it doing with my body how it does in different climates and there's this experience around how I want people to feel in the clothes is super important and how long we want you to be wearing them and there's also a convertibility element.

22:24I would say a lot of our clothes are convertible or adjustable. Like you'd have a dress that has a like attached shawl into it, but the shawl can be removed. So you can just wear the shawl by itself and the dress by itself. We have these jumpsuits that are convertible to be pants or to be tight 19 different ways. Like that element is super important because you can wear it 10 times and each time it looks different versus wearing it once and be like, okay, people have seen it. I cannot wear it anymore. But every time it's going to be like, oh, are you wearing a new dress? So you think about all of that from like a durability standpoint.

22:53Okay, so I want to talk about some of the philosophical parts of this. And I also want to talk about the Senegalese parts of this. But I personally have a connection to Senegal. I lived there and worked there. And so I have some things that I want to... This is how we should have started. I know. I wanted to start with you. And then I studied at Université Cheikh Anta-Jop. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's my hometown. Oh, really? You were from Dakar originally? I'm from Dakar. Yeah. Okay. Where in Dakar? Mermouz. Oh, wow. That's like where I lived. I was in... Oh, my God! Cité des Professeurs. Yeah. That's literally, okay.

23:23That's like a five minute walk. Oh yeah, I walked fast every day. Yeah. When was this? What year? It was, let's see, it was 2008. And then I went back in 2010. Oh my God. Yeah, you were in my home, literally. Probably passing in front of my house every day. Well, so I wanted to ask you about a couple of things that come to mind with me. There's this very big part of culture is having fun colors and making a statement with how you dress. And for me, as a person who like wasn't always a super confident person and also was a teenage boy and then a young adult man, a lot of the way that I would have said I related to fashion was trying to be invisible.

24:04Right. Like wearing something that's just like no one's going to comment on this. Yeah. And so it was really interesting to then go to Senegal. And like my Senegalese friend one day, like as a present, bought me like a big, a big boo-boo. And I put that on and I walked down the street and people were like, hey, looking good. You know, like people were like giving me compliments. And I was like, oh, that's actually really fun. I never experienced that piece before. And I feel like that spirit of like celebrating how you look and complimenting a stranger is so apparent in the clothes that you designed.

24:34Like they're the kind of things where people are going to go, I love that. You look great. You know, it's not quiet clothing. not at all we don't want to be quiet about anything and that's the part of my culture that i wanted to bring i have this group chat with my family i would say 90 of the conversation are us complimenting each other like my dad would be going to a business meeting and you know he will take a selfie and the dad selfie like he doesn't know the angles and everything but he will take a selfie and be like oh killing it with that hat crushing it since 1958 oh i love that everybody's gonna add then you have to add a comment and a compliment yeah and that's what all we do all day it's in it's hilarious it doesn't matter how sad you are you open that group there's like 50 matches every hour and it's just compliments emojis ridiculous laughter and that's our culture like if you have an event in senegal it's not about you it's about the guests you have a poet called the griot i'm sure you know who's basically singing your praises so you'll come in and be like hey chris and they'll make a poem about you and the boo boo and it's gonna have a rhyme for each verse and they'll name you and praise you in front of everyone with a mic and drums and you cannot if you cannot erase yourself you have to be really much like you cannot be self-effacing in any way so your outfits have to hit you know the way you carry yourself your attitude your smile your energy and i wanted to just put all of that into the clothes we design and like you know whenever i get feedback from customers or they tag us on instagram it's always oh we got so many compliments i'm like yep that was the plan that's the like really good part I also want to say a piece that I noticed while I was in Senegal that I think is a darker side to the fashion industry in the United States and in Europe that I think is invisible to many people, but it's very visible when you're there, which is that let's say you're just the regular consumer of clothes in the United States and you're done with a T-shirt or a dress or a pair of pants.

26:22You think that you're being responsible because what you do is you go and you give it to a charity that says they're going to reuse it. Right. And often those big pallets of clothes then get shipped into other parts of the world, like West Africa. And, you know, I'd be walking around in like rural Senegal and I'd see a kid wearing like I won the best clam bake in Rhode Island. And I'd be like, what? How did you get that shirt? But there's also this huge amount of textile waste that is just polluting the water, polluting the land is just actually being shipped to a place that did not create the waste.

26:54Exactly. And I think that's the part that's so unfair because I think people don't see. It's like, oh, charity, I'm donating my clothes. I'm being a better person. But you're donating it to a person who didn't ask for it. And you're also killing the local economy where you donate it. Because these clothes coming in from the U.S., from these charities, they sell for close to nothing. But meanwhile, you have local artisans there who are making good quality clothes from locally grown cotton, handmade, with heritage, with all of the history. but they have a hard time selling them because we're being flooded with all this secondhand clothing that people here just start throwing in some container and also cheaply made stuff from like you know other manufacturing countries like China etc so I think it would be good for people from the western world to actually understand really the impacts of this because it does affect us significantly and a lot of those clothes are not wanted I think people assume oh I'm sending it to the poor country and they'll wear it I'm sorry we have style because the country is poor doesn't mean there is no sense of, like the fashion level I've seen in Senegal and the scrappiness of people, regardless of their social class is unmatched.

27:57So like that big sell Rhode Island t-shirt, if you send us a million of those, we don't want to wear them. You want to wear something beautiful. You want to wear something that fits, that looks good, that we chose. So that's something that I think it's worth talking about for sure. That is something that is worth talking about for sure. And we are going to talk about for sure right after this break.

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30:37Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we are back. So, Diara, I think that in addition to all the amazing things about your creative and artistic and personal story, I think another thing that's really interesting about your work is the political story here. I think it's quite subtle, but it's really important. I read this book by the Zambian economist Dembisa Moyo. It's called Dead Aid, Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. And I'm summarizing her point, but it's basically that the Western world has often really undermined local economies and undermined local independence by charity.

31:12So like they send 10 ,000 tons of free rice to an area. Well, that's great for the people who get the rice. It feeds them. But then the local rice farmers are completely put out of business and they can't produce rice anymore because how could they ever compete with free rice? And then when the free rice doesn't keep coming, now there are no longer rice farmers in the area. So it creates this cycle of dependence. And something similar has really happened in the fashion industry where cheap clothes are sent to Africa and then the clothes that were produced locally that were much higher quality, they can't compete with that free, low quality clothing.

31:51and so people get put out of business. But you are consciously breaking that cycle. You are employing these skilled craftspeople who live in Senegal and you're changing that whole narrative. Absolutely. And I think even like culturally, there's also the erasure of fashion by doing that because you're sending donated clothes that are, I mean, they're still gonna get sold but at very low prices. So like local artisans do suffer and you're erasing them and their skills because it's like, how am I gonna sell something that I took hours to make in good quality versus something that just came in from Rhode Island that's like a few cents.

32:23And there's also like just this idea of if you want to help someone, like don't give me free fish, teach me how to fish. So like, yeah, all of that is great. But what about you support our economies? What about you buy from African brands like the Air Blue? What about you, you know, support in a way that's creating human sustainability? The donation of a shirt from a charity standpoint, it makes you feel good. You just went to Goodwill or wherever, dropped something and you're like, oh, I did a good act. I donated my shirt. But what about you do something that's more sustainable and you actually empower and support those industries or those people in a way that they can continue to self-sustain?

32:58You know, it also goes to an idea and a phrase that I learned while I was in Senegal, a Wola phrase that I thought was very powerful. I think about a lot, em bolo mo dole, which is like, together we're strong, right? Like the union creates the strength. The strength, exactly. Exactly. That's not something I often think about when I'm buying clothes is like, how is this clothing purchase an act of unifying with other people? Or how is it an act of just being about me? That even the purchase of clothes can be a way of demonstrating that care for each other and that virtue of community mindedness.

33:31We are all connected. I mean, yeah, we can have boundaries between us and countries and languages, but at the end of the day, we are one people. I mean, that's how I think about the world. And if you think about yourself, not as this tiny little aunt in the system, but like you are the system. Every choice you make impacts the system. And when you think about your purchases, not just for clothes, but it may sound heavy, but like, I think it can become almost second nature. Like how is all these decisions affecting the overall system? I think you're adding to it. Are you taking away from it? But just having that mindset will help, I think, make a lot of better decisions in general, especially with purchasing and sustainability as a whole.

34:09For someone who is thinking about their clothes or their fashion differently, what advice would you have for them? What are maybe three things that they should think about differently when they go about looking in their closets or purchasing new clothes? I would say I think it's important to have a capsule wardrobe. And what I call a capsule wardrobe is like your essential basics that you could wear all the time. Like for me, it's like a black pair of jeans, black pants, a plain white or black shirt, things that are just timeless. And then have your like dramatic add-ons that really make the statement.

34:39Like I will always wear all black with a dramatic Dior blue kimono on it or a dramatic jacket or a denim jacket. Like there's all these accessories. So I would say I'm sure everybody looking in their closets and saying, oh, I have nothing to wear. You can always find some capsule pieces there that are timeless and focus on those and then make that decor. and then see what you can add to it. We should think about shopping in a way of buying things that are complimentary. So like, how can you get, you know, these colorful, beautiful pens you bought last year? How can you bring them back to life this year, but with another way of styling it, where it looks completely different?

35:09How do you make your purchases complimentary where, and I think about this a lot with our collections as well. How can you buy five things, but, you know, a mix of sets and dresses and whatnot, but for those five things actually create 10 to 15 outfits, because permutations, computation, that's the math in me. And then the third one is just kind of be mindful about everything you're doing with your wallet. You're voting for something, right? So everything you purchase, always ask yourself, what am I voting for here? Like I'm voting with my dollars for something. Yeah, it could be beautiful style.

35:39But what is the tag inside saying? Like for me, buying something, a dress for$8 on some fast fashion website, you're voting for exploitation. You're voting for waste. Like there is no way somebody can produce a dress for$8 with the right fabric and be paid the right wages. If that happens, it's because somebody has been exploited in the supply chain and you are voting for that. Right. So just ask yourself those questions. And I think it's just common sense. Like, do these numbers actually make sense? Like, oh, yeah, I just did a shopping haul with$50 and I got 20 dresses. Like, how does that even make any sense logically?

36:11And like what had to have happened for these dresses to get to you? I think those are difficult questions and conversations to have with yourself, but I think they are important. Another thing that I think is really interesting about you and your work is in some ways you are supporting these very old fashioned traditional ways of making things. Having a skilled artisan making something on demand rather than creating a ton. But in other ways, you are very much using your you're using these very new technologies as well. Right. Like there's artificial intelligence is involved in your work. So can you talk about the blend between old and new and how you think about that from a values perspective I'm actually really interested in too, right?

36:50Oftentimes, the moment you drop words like AI and tech and what, it's the antithesis of artisan craftsmanship. It's just two words that don't talk to each other. Technology is just a tool. It doesn't matter. It's just like you're using a typewriter before and now you have a printer. But ultimately, what matters is the quality of the letter you're writing. If you're writing a love letter, it doesn't matter if you write on a typewriter, on a printer. On a printer, you can make more of them and send them out faster and maybe meet your love faster. But the letter content has to be good. You have to have passion in your love letter.

37:19You have to write it well. You have to have skill. You have to understand language. So that was the kind of example I like to give. And I think in fashion, for me, technology is what allows me to actually humanize this whole thing. Because think about it. If an artisan takes forever to make a dress manually, because you don't have an industrial factory, it's all like, I call it a workshop, right? and if you're going to take all this time doing all this work it better be the right work I don't want to guess I want to give them exactly what they need to produce and to do that technology helps me crowdsource really fast I can use AI or math or whatever to create these prints or like these ideas of the prints and the tones and the things I want to put out there I can put them on digital avatars within 24 hours I know what to do and that's the part that for me that is super strong because technology allows me to test and learn and figure out what is right fast and then the production and all of that can take its time and be done right versus if I didn't have technology and I still wanted to do this artisanal way of things now I'm subjecting them to all this work with a lot of waste because they'll be producing all these things that nobody likes and then what do we do with it so that's kind of how I blend the two words and I think they can be very complementary if we use the right way I don't see a word where I'm going to be like 3d printing dresses and all of that.

38:30Like, it's just I want human hands touching the products. So as long as the tech is more from a data, information, accuracy, like I want to know I'm wrong faster than everyone else. There are these incredibly powerful new technologies that are being developed, but they are often being developed by and I would say not just by but for people with one very specific background, right? Like wealthy white men who went to one of 20 different colleges in the United States or maybe a few in Europe. What happens when a powerful technology then gets used by someone who can bring a completely different perspective, right?

39:06Like you have this history of understanding how fashion works in Senegal, of understanding what it looks like on the ground and how could technology change that? Yeah. And I think this is something that honestly, I learned in the classroom. It was like how having a different perspective can really shift things. same for fashion technology for me was i'm working all the time i don't have time to make all these drawings and create all these textiles and then have them made and pay all this money and create all this waste how can i use technology to get to my answer quicker and still make people feel that's good technology that's like humanizing the whole experience i was using ai before ai was cool and i thought it was such a weird thing because it was just like is this gonna ever be used at scale because it took, back then, like rendering images took forever and it was just super, super slow.

39:50But it was all generative stuff that was faster than sitting down and taking three days to draw one textile versus being able to create 100 iterations in one day and get answers. I think perspective is super important. And I think intention too. Like technology oftentimes is thought about in terms of efficiency and saving money and making money and all of it. But for me, it was honestly about how do I use technology to not waste my time and to not waste resources and people's time. And naturally saving money and making money comes with it because you're saving resources. Some of my discomfort with AI is often that it seems like it's built where at its core, it is taking human work and then devaluing it, right?

40:33Like it is like anonymously built on all this work that people put their blood, sweat and tears into. And it kind of makes a lot of people's work invisible. Are we buying into a framework that says these few powerful people can take the work of less powerful people and that that's something that is OK to build the future on? And I don't know the answer, but I'm curious what your perspective is. And I fully agree with you. I think when I first started seeing like these AI art models in the very beginning, I don't know if you remember, it would take a picture and tell you the Picasso version of it and a version of it.

41:02And it was just so lame, to be honest. And I remember talking to a museum here that I was working with, and they mentioned that what they hate about AI art is that a lot of art is about history and sources and citing. Like you put a work and then you have to cite the references. You have to cite the inspiration, the history. And AI kind of erases all of that and just create derivative stuff. Yeah. The way I use it in particular is that, I don't know, let's say I want to do something about a flower garden as a print. I can easily sketch a flower garden in like 30 seconds with doodles and it's going to be hideous.

41:34but then I can plug that into AI and say take my sketch and add green and purple and make the flowers fill up the screen and blah blah blah so in a way it's kind of based on my work or like on old prints I've designed and things and I think my work has a very clear signature when you look at it where you can see it's consistent but I think with all these technologies you have to be really mindful and you have to be very clear like what is the message that you're trying to give like the message I'm trying to give is hey I want to develop and work on things but before I put so much effort into it.

42:03I want to know if you like it. For me, it's a prototyping tool, prototyping and testing and understanding what do I want to put human sweat and tears into. That tracks for me. And I also think that, look, it would be relatively easy for someone to set up a shop that's called like Mara Blue, and then they could use AI and copy a lot of your stuff, your story and the care and the thought and the philosophy behind it. I think that actually imbues the physical objects with value in a way that someone's copy would not. I really believe that. And I believe that about a lot of people's work as artists.

42:40Yeah. And I believe it too. I think that's what makes art like what makes something stand in a museum be worth so much and print copy on the street is not, it's because people feel that energy. I think authenticity is, is value. And it's something you cannot explain, but you can feel. And I think that's what with art, I love this code that saying art wasn't supposed to look nice. It was supposed to make you feel something. And you can't explain it. And I think when something is done authentically with the right intention and the right way, you'll just feel it. Because yeah, in this world of AI, it's getting a lot easier to copy people and replicate, but you cannot replicate authenticity.

43:14One barrier for people is that a lot of times ethical, artistic, and sustainable clothing is significantly more expensive. How do you think about that balance of affordability and also the values? Yeah, I think that's very difficult. And that was one thing of my brand. I wanted the positioning to be premium, but not like inaccessible. And I think that's what allowed us to grow really fast is because we were having things sitting next to brands that are selling like$500 dresses,$600 dresses, and our dresses were like$195,$225. And that felt like, is this for real? and it was$2.25 and made to order.

43:54You get it in seven days and it's adjusted to your height. Like, is this even for real? And he was like, yeah, it's for real because those brands that sell$700 dresses, they've put all their cash in inventory. They're producing this big volume. They have to build in all the waste they're going to have. They're going to sell on markdown, 70 % off at some point to survive. We build in not doing all of that. So we can have a lower price because we're taking less risks in the beginning to begin with. And we have more cash flow for when we are wrong, we can shift right away. and yeah maybe our margins are not as great as those ones but maybe we scale we can do better and as the brand grows obviously we you know sometimes you have to introduce more high-end products that are going to be fancier fabrics and fancier construction but I always want to keep the core products in the brand at a price that's at least an entry-level price point I mean it's still not cheap we're not selling$50 dresses because it's just not possible in the model we have but you cannot be sustainable if you're only talking to the top one percent like it just doesn't work.

44:48If you want to do something to make change, you have to reach people. It's a tough decision to make. Financially, sometimes it's hard and we take a hit, but it's super important to me. Diara Busso, thank you so much for being on the show. It was such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It was fun. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Diara Busso. You can find more about her work and see photos of her clothes online at diarablu.com. That's D-I-A-R-R-A-B-L-U dot com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

45:26How to be a better human is assembled by a team who together create strength. On the TED side, we've got the fashionable Daniela Ballarezzo, Ban Ban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who dress themselves in the truth. On the PRX side, they design audios so beautiful, it is internationally recognized. Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Hey, share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it.

46:00Send it to a person who you think looks great. Tell them, hey, I sent you this episode because you have a great fashion sense. We will be back next week with more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks again for listening.

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