The Bazin: Malian Fashion Threads of Power, Color and Culture
Hand-dyed damask cotton, also called Bazin and referred to as Boubous for men, is the raw material of Malian fashion. The Malian blind singer Amadou Bakayoko and Mariam Doumbia paid tribute to this fabric in an album released in 2005, “Beaux Dimanche,” with the following lyrics: “Sunday in Bamako is the wedding day. Men and women have put on their most beautiful boubous. The bazins are there, and it’s the wedding day.” The track became the hit song on an album that won two prestigious BBC awards the following year, including the Best Album Award in the “World Music” category.
Two blind people singing the beauty of the bazin, the floral patterns and the gleaming colors that make young women so elegant that single men hurry to ask them in marriage? The paradox has something to seduce. If you show up to a wedding without wearing a bazin, you might as well not show up at all.
The Bazin a Rich Fabric
For about two decades, the bazin has become a real fashion and social phenomenon in Mali and West Africa. It is in Mali that the entire sub-region comes to seek the precious material. With its superb stiffness, its explosive colors, its original embroidery, and its screeching characteristics, the bazin is the fabric of special occasions. The real “damask has become a luxury product.
The Three Different Styles of Bazin
The rich bazin is characterized by its weaving technique of 100% fine cotton of superior quality. In contact with dye, it gives off an exceptional shine.
The medium rich is the second choice born from the arrival of the Chinese competition, which produces a bazin of inferior quality. It costs about two times less than the bazin rich.
The less rich is the last one to allow small budgets to afford it. Its cots up to 4 times less than the bazin rich.
You are probably asking how to know which one the rich one. Generally, women and Bazin’s sellers are the ones to see the difference between each type. But when people see and touch them, it is easy to find the rich one because it has a feeling of sweetness that others don’t have.
The price of a meter of rich bazin varies between 5,000 and 5,500 CFA francs, which is about $7 to $10. However to look stunning, a rich bazin outfit costs between $150 and $200.
The process of manufacturing
The bazin is a 100% cotton damask fabric, and hand-dyeing is often laborious work for the women who make it. First, they import the material, mostly cotton and silk or wool from Germany, the Netherlands, or China. Then, they cut it according to the standard dimensions. To then obtain the bazin, the white damask is dyed in several colors with different patterns. The fabric is then soaked in a dye bath, rinsed, drained, re-soaked until the desired color is obtained. The bazin is then washed with cold water until the products disappear entirely. Lastly, to prevent the fabric from tearing, it is put to dry in the sun. When the material comes out, it presents colorful spirals, large circles, or different patterns.
Originally, bazin was dyed with natural indigo, and the products used for the dyeing were ash-based potash and clay, which was very harmless. Since the 1990s, manufacturing processes have modernized with chemical dyes, caustic soda, and hydrosulfate. Once the dye is chosen, the caustic soda and the hydrosulfate are dissolved in water. These two products allow, by chemical reaction, better resistance of the dye on cotton.
Malians have always been known for their cloth-making and previously rivaled the Yoruba of Nigeria. In the 1960s, when synthetic dyes arrived in West Africa, Malians learned to use them according to their aesthetic preferences. Since then, Nigerians have carved out a niche for themselves in embroidery, leaving Malians in the sector of high-quality hand-dyed fabrics.
Jewelry Wear with the Bazin
Malian women take a lot of pride in their jewelry, especially when they are going to weddings. To go with the rich embroidery bazin, women wear gold necklaces, bracelets, and earrings because it symbolizes in Mali wealth, money, and prestige between Malian women. So, women see weddings as the perfect occasion to dress up and wear their most expensive gold jewelry.
