Alex Sudheim
The Durban Designer Collection celebrates its 20th anniversary this year by boldly taking one of the country’s most established and largest fashion shows to where it has never been before.
According to Suzy Bell, the event’s creative director and arts editor of the Independent on Saturday (one of the event’s sponsors), the philosophy behind this year’s “Fuse” theme is “to take designer fashion and meld it with contemporary art on the ramp.
“The fusion of fashion and art is a strategic means of survival for artists and designers – there is a great need to appeal to a wider audience to counter fashion’s reputation as an elitist pursuit.”
To this end, Durban designers and artists have collaborated on a broad spectrum of ranges which reflect a distinctly Durban multi-cultural reality. Embracing instead of alienating the idiomatic street styles of various Durban sub-cultures, the designers and artists have attempted a “conceptual” approach to fashion where the gritty presence of local life prevails over the hazy pretensions of Eurocentric fashion.
In the MTN Young Designer category, designer Rashad Khan subverts the traditional sari by decorating the garments with images from the Kama Sutra by controversial Durban artist Asiya Swaleh. In the Hooch Loose Cannon category James Beckett and Marcel Duvenague explore the conceptual possibilities of Muslim military wear, with the soundtrack of their show featuring a melancholic love song sung by famed quawali singer Fowzia Banu.
Invited designer Amanda Laird Cherry utilises the scruffy urban energy of Warwick Triangle, featuring as one of her “character models” a grizzled old black man pushing a trolley full of scrap metal.
Another interesting aspect of the show is the fact that all the ranges are accompanied by South African music: from the kwaito of TK Zee to the hard rap-rock of Seed and from Skelton’s maskanda to traditional Indian flautists and tabla players, just about every genre in the country is represented.
“Street but sophisticated” is how Bell sums up the show, which will take place on an enormous ramp lit up like an airport runway and extending over the olympic-sized Kings Park swimming pool.
Hirt & Carter Interactive have compiled the “third dimension” of audio-visual material, which will be projected onto a huge screen behind the ramp. Here, for example, patrons will be treated to documentary images from the Holocaust (put together by videographer Jean-Pierre Leroux) that accompany Yolande Wortmann’s range.
Providing a taste of original Durban expression in the hyper-aestheticised world of fashion, DDC 1999 looks set to be a sensational extravaganza with an edge of roughness to grate against all that immaculate beauty.
Next Friday and Saturday (May 28 and May 29) there are shows at 7pm and 9.30pm, with the prize-winners being announced during the final Saturday show. Tickets cost R40, R70 and R100. Book at Computicket: (031) 304-2753