Designer brings haute couture home to S.Leone

By Katrina Manson

FREETOWN (Reuters) - Women carrying corn on their heads and children selling peanuts stop to stare as a leggy model in a tiny, blue dress strikes a pose outside a steel-doored clothes shop in Sierra Leone's capital.

Adama Kai, a fashion designer trained in New York and Paris, organized the photo-shoot to promote her new store and company, Aschobi Designs. The 25-year-old has eschewed job prospects in the developed world to come home and follow her dream.

"Maybe I have more opportunities as a designer over there, but I'm making a bigger statement over here," said Kai, who was born in New Jersey but moved to Sierra Leone shortly afterwards and lived there until she was four.

"In the same way that Ralph Lauren stands for America, Chanel for France, and Versace for Italy, I want Aschobi to stand for African fashion," she said.

Her store is tucked between a small printers and a newspaper office in hilly Freetown's hectic downtown.

"I know this is the last place you'd expect to find haute couture. But I want to replace all of this darkness of the past with beauty," she said.

Sierra Leone, ranked the world's least developed country by the United Nations, is recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war that shocked the world with images of drugged-up child soldiers hacking off villagers' limbs with machetes.

An estimated 30-50 percent of skilled Sierra Leoneans fled the conflict, in which 50,000 people were killed.