Laetitia Ky

Laetitia Ky was born in 1996 and grew up in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. She has a degree in Business Administration from Institut national polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Yamoussoukro. After graduating, she began a career in fashion design but was soon inspired to change direction by looking at archival photographs of African women’s hairstyles. She began creating these new fusions of hair art and sculpture in 2016.

Ky‘s hallmark style is creating sculptures from wire, thread and her dreadlocks (lengthened with weaves into her natural hair). She calls this style the Ky Concept. These styles express her creativity and increasingly, her politics. Each sculpture takes between twenty minutes and six hours to create. The first iteration of her sculptural hair art involved wrapping braids in African wax print cloth. In 2017 she hosted her first “Ky Braids” workshop to teach the art-form to others.