Koun impérial: how moroccan heritage and discarded materials become contemporary design
KOUN’s first collection looks to Morocco’s four imperial cities, Rabat, Fès, Meknès and Marrakech, to explore how heritage can become a starting point for contemporary design, circularity and social imapct.
KOUN’s first collection looks to Morocco’s four imperial cities, Rabat, Fès, Meknès and Marrakech, to explore how heritage can become a starting point for contemporary design, circularity and social imapct.
Moroccan social enterprise KOUN has unveiled KOUN Impérial, its first collection, drawing inspiration from the four imperial cities of Morocco. Across 25 unique pieces, the collection translates architectural details, colours, materials and craft references associated with Rabat, Fès, Meknès and Marrakech into contemporary objects and accessories.
But the cities were not chosen simply as a visual theme. For Nada Diouri, KOUN’s co-manager and Creative Director, the collection became a way of introducing the young artisans trained by the enterprise to the history and heritage surrounding their own practice.
KOUN’s model combines Moroccan craftsmanship with the revalorisation of materials that might otherwise have reached the end of their useful lives. Since 2017, its workshops have worked with recovered textiles, plastics and other materials, while training and integrating young people into a renewed approach to Moroccan craft.
For KOUN Impérial, that process began outside the studio. Diouri travelled to the four cities, observing their textures, colours and architectural details through what she describes as an artistic eye. Rather than reproducing traditional motifs literally, the collection extracts particular elements from each place and translates them through material.
Rabat emerges through its green gardens and the kharmoud, while Fès is approached through golden tones associated with light and the blue Diouri encountered in the city. Meknès led her towards another material language. Her research uncovered historical cultural exchanges with Damascus and a distinctive use of black and silver, which KOUN interpreted by weaving video cassette tape with traditional Moroccan silver thread.
For Marrakech, the starting point was the ochre and earthy character of the millennial city. Tobacco-coloured leather is combined with beige felt recovered from KOUN’s clients and partners, creating a new material relationship from elements that already carried a previous life.
The material itself is central to KOUN’s story. Its production process is designed around reuse, including reintegrating offcuts into new production rather than treating them automatically as waste. Materials considered finished are given another function and, with it, another chapter.
As Diouri explains, this philosophy extends beyond the object itself:
“Every material has its story, every young person has their story. That is what each person will carry through these bags. But the story continues with the person who carries it.”
The idea makes KOUN Impérial more than an exercise in translating Moroccan heritage into contemporary aesthetics. The collection connects three forms of continuation: the continuation of materials through circular design, of craftsmanship through training and transmission, and of cultural references through reinterpretation.
Instead of asking how Moroccan heritage can simply be preserved, KOUN’s first collection proposes another possibility, that heritage can remain alive by becoming material for something new.
Website keywords: KOUN, KOUN Impérial, Nada Diouri, Saadia Slaoui, Moroccan design, Moroccan craftsmanship, Morocco imperial cities, Rabat, Fès, Meknès, Marrakech, circular design Morocco, sustainable design Morocco, Moroccan artisans, contemporary Moroccan design, upcycling Morocco, social enterprise Morocco
This angle keeps the collection at the centre while moving beyond a product launch, particularly through the relationship between heritage, material reuse and transmission, which fits CULTIQ’s approach to heritage as a living language. It also follows the News Story principle that the announcement should be the starting point rather than the entire story.
Photo : @lanada_