Mali Mode was a fashion show that took place at the Museum of Bamako, Mali in October 2008 in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name. It features traditional and contemporary Malian costumes and accessories by Kandioura Coulibaly and the Groupe Bogolan Kasobane.

When I talk of fashion, I think of the fashion of life and the fashion of dress. The fashion of life obligates people to adapt their fashion of dress. The objects that surround people permit them to make their way of life. A farmer needs a life that facilitates the raising of crops. A herder needs to conform to his herd. People need ways of life that conform their thoughts with their environment.

Clothes are a second skin between the body and the regard of others. Clothes are also a defense of the body, of all the systems of organization inside the body. Clothes are an exterior protection that inhibits the cold, the rays of the sun to impact the body. Just as the body is constituted of skin, of nerves, of cells, of hemoglobin, clothes also need accessories to survive.

Clothes can be the cause of seduction, cause of protection, and at the same time clothes symbolize the class and the function, the situation of man himself. Clothes offer a first image of the person. Fashion is constituted in thought, and later it rejoins the body. It is an organization of life.

–Kandioura Coulibaly