Al Badiya ٠١ is where the story begins.
For Younes El Ouafiq and Salaheddine Farhane, founders of Al Badiya Studio, the idea of a beginning carries weight. Raised in Italy, but rooted in Morocco, they built their Marrakech-based studio as a space to explore what it means to live between cultures. Through visuals that merge fashion, documentary, and memory, they tell stories shaped by both inheritance and distance.
This first editorial, Al Badiya ٠١, looks at memory through texture, land, and light. Shot against a rugged Moroccan landscape, the project places a Berber rug at its centre, a familiar object reimagined as a symbol. It represents warmth, safety, and maternal protection. It also carries the weight of return. Not just to a place, but to a feeling. To something known and deeply felt, even if unnamed.
In the middle of it all is Sita Yasmine Ouattara, a young woman from Côte d’Ivoire navigating her own path in Morocco. Draped in woven textiles, her presence becomes a reflection of what it means to move through spaces where you are both seen and misunderstood. Her story mirrors that of the artists — shaped by migration, by belonging that is always partial. Yet in these images, she is grounded. She belongs not to a country, but to the moment.
This is not just a fashion shoot. It is an act of remembering. A way of documenting where we come from and how we carry it.
“In every thread, a memory. In every knot, a prayer.”
The quote is simple, but it lingers as a quiet reminder that craft holds history, and that beauty can hold grief.
Overall, Al Badiya ٠١ is the first in an ongoing series that explores heritage through visual storytelling. It brings Moroccan craft into dialogue with the African diaspora, asking what happens when cultural memory is not preserved in archives but worn, walked on, and lived.
It’s a beginning, yes, but also a reminder that some stories were never lost. They were just waiting for the right language to be told.
