Fashion: The Inventive Africans

She was allergic to the sun, terrified of snakes and never met an elephant she couldn’t do without, but Jenny Bell Bechtel came home from her first safari with big game under her belt and a blazing career in the bag.

She didn’t even have to go deep into the bush around Nairobi to trap her trophies but found them already wrapped, breast-high, around the ladies in the mud huts. To them, the kikoi was only a brightly colored piece of cloth, good enough to wear to market, but nothing a native would get restless about. Stunning, thought Jenny Bell, and bought some, intending to turn them into tablecloths. But back in Manhattan, she realized that the Kenya hutwives had been right all along: the kikois were dashing as dresses. She ran up a few tentative models, found the response so enthusiastic that she ran up a few more. Lord & Taylor ordered 1,000, and promptly sold them; so did Dallas’ Neiman-Marcus.

Though she is a touch too pretty to look as if she knew what she was doing, Jenny Bell, 36, is no fashion fledgling. While still a college girl at Sweet Briar, she made the cover of Mademoiselle Magazine (“It was scrubbed looks and bangs they were after”). Two years later, she found that no one cared if she scrubbed or grew grimy, (“Sophisticated models were the ones who got jobs”), decided to try her hand at designing instead. After 17 jobs and 13 years on Manhattan’s 7th Avenue, she was unemployed. “Manufacturers,” she explained, “never did what I asked them to.” Some friends who lived in Kenya invited her to go on a safari. She jumped at the chance and onto the next plane.

Back this month from a third expedition, Jenny Bell displayed her wares—kikois galore, plus 100 Spanish rugs picked up on a stop in Madrid. Handsome enough on parquet, the rugs will look even better on girls, Jenny Bell thinks, when she shapes them into evening gowns. As for her transformed kikois, this year, like last, the styles will vary only slightly—some are sleeveless, some two-piece, some shifts and some full-length. But though every kikoi has a border and a sunburst or some scroll work in the middle, the material of each is unique. Most come inscribed with a message in Swahili, and the girl who cares enough to dig up an interpreter may find she is advertising “Love Is like Grass.” For as little as $29.95, presto! A walking fortune cookie.