From the founder
Rekia & Joséphine carries the names of my two grandmothers, one with a resonance that speaks to my African heritage and the other unmistakably French. Together, they hold the two halves of an identity I have carried throughout my life as a woman of Beninese lineage, born and raised in Metz, a border city where languages, cultures, and histories have always existed alongside one another. That awareness of belonging to more than one world followed me through Paris and Strasbourg, then across an ocean to Montréal and, eventually, Toronto, teaching me that home is not always a single place, but rather a collection of languages, memories, and stories held together across distance. By a beautiful coincidence, the brand also shares the initials my sister and I carry, giving the name another layer of intimacy. It began, then, the way the most meaningful inheritances often do: with women, family, and something passed down so intentionally that it could one day be carried forward by someone else.
For most of my life, the things meant to make me feel beautiful were never made with me in mind. I remember the headbands from my school years and how they would lift and gap over my braided hair, refusing to sit the way they seemed to sit so effortlessly on everyone else. We laughed and called them serre-tempes, temple-bands, but beneath the joke was a lesson I would spend years learning how to name. My hair was expected to change for the accessory, while the accessory was never expected to honour the shape, texture, or fullness of my hair. For a long time, I accepted that those objects simply were not meant for me. I adjusted, improvised, and adapted until I realized the product should bend. We should not have to.
With this knowing, I created what I had spent years searching for, beginning with the belief that Black women should not have to alter themselves to experience beauty with ease. Every choice at Rekia & Joséphine begins with textured hair and places Black women at the centre of the design from the very first line. La Rivière, my first piece, is strung on a dark filament as fine as a single strand of hair, chosen specifically for the way it disappears into black and brown hair. What remains visible are the pearls themselves, suspended like light across water, drawing attention to the individual rather than the structure holding the piece in place. Nothing here is accidental. “Beautiful by design” is the conviction beneath every piece I make. The beauty was already there, long before the adornment arrived. My work is to reveal it, frame it, and honour what Afro-heritage hair has always carried.
I make these pieces for the girl I once was, bending headbands over her braids, and for every woman who wants adornment to begin with her, exactly as she is.
Beauty is the right to adorn yourself without apology, to take up space, and to decide how you want to be seen. Whether she is a bride wearing her hair exactly as she imagined it, a woman determined to turn every head in the room, or someone finding new pleasure in an ordinary day, La Rivière is made for the moment she chooses to express herself entirely on her own terms.
It is made for the woman who knows who she is and delights in expressing it.
- Romance