Creativity, melodrama and humour left no room for practicality at the SA finals of the Smirnoff Fashion Awards, writes HAZEL FRIEDMAN
THERE was a delicious irony in arriving at the Swartkops Airforce Base — the training ground for South Africa’s Special Forces — and being escorted by khaki-clad recce-types in Casspirs to a fashion show called The Exhilaration of Liberty.
Held in an empty hangar on the Swartkops koppie overlooking Pretoria, this post-apartheid fashion extravaganza was organised to pick the winner from 30 finalists to represent South Africa in the Smirnoff International Fashion Awards (Sifa) in November. Widely regarded as the world’s most prestigious competition for young designers, Sifa attracts the talents of students from 33 countries who compete annually for the $10 000 prize.
Launched by Smirnoff Vodka in 1984 in the form of the Smirnoff Young Designer Award, it has been held in Amsterdam, London, Sao Paolo and Dublin. It was inevitable — given this year’s freedom theme — that Cape Town would host the world finals of the 1995 award. But, as the South African finals proved, one designer’s liberty is another’s bondage.
Maybe that’s because the brief for The Exhilaration of Liberty was so itsy-bitsy that most finalists missed it altogether. Some of the garments were certainly exhilarating in terms of innovation. But the liberty got lost beneath the cages, chains and Jean-Paul Gaultier look-a-likes.
The techno-rave sounds didn’t do much for the cause of freedom either. After two hours of generic thuds, interspersed with mindless sound bites — and aided by a wind-chill factor of minus 20 degrees — you could feel the onset of mental rigor mortis.
As for the designer creations, or rather, contraptions, they were almost without exception of the FX breed. Forget flowing lines and classic curves. Post-modern pastichisms, industrial Gothic, The Addams Family, Aliens, Terminator, Interview With the Vampire, Bride of Frankenstein and other icons of shock and schlock reigned supreme, as did found objects, mixed media and cross-cultural references.
Each finalist was required to design a principal garment as well as two side outfits. But while creative energy, frenzied imagination, melodrama and humour were clearly in abundance, practicality and simple principles of co-ordination were low on the priority ladder. For example, the first garment — if one can call a futuristic spacesuit held together with various tubes in day-glo green and purple and encased in a transparent bubble on wheels — a garment, offered a glimpse into the intensive-care units of the future. The second, a painted bodystocking, was worn by a model whose vertical dreadlocks appeared to be the result of an unfortunate incident with a plug socket.
Yet another should have earned the sylph-like model who dared to wear it an award for courage. She braved the ramp enclosed, or rather entrapped, in a cage, wearing headgear that would have done a heavy metal rickshaw driver proud. She teetered along the edge of the ramp like a tightrope walker — arms outstretched and glassy-eyed — wobbling on clod hoppers that resembled prosthetics. But while she very nearly lost her footing, her dignity remained intact, more or less.
Fashionable features included capes shaped like Christmas decorations or mausoleums for the living dead, as well as elaborate headgear featuring candelabra or atlas globes. Of course, there were designers who diligently adhered to the liberty theme. Jacques Marais from the Pretoria Technikon, for example, interpreted it quite literally. He designed a cloak `a la the new South Africa, which would have gone down — or up — well at a flag-raising ceremony. Claudia Trigger, a student at the London International School of Fashion, designed a full-length Ndebele dress, flanked by Kalahari Outback-style garments which were truly spectacular.
Also on the memorable shortlist was an outfit by the Natal Technikon’s Tracey Hesson — a white, neo-Gothic wedding dress with dramatic flair that was magnificent in its off-beat elegance. Then there was Nadia Osman’s peacock cloak and train, which when spread, revealed its feather-like finery, not to mention an ingenious grass-hut garment by Shertinah Molokoane, of the Pretoria Technikon.
Needless to say, my favourites didn’t win, although Molokoane did receive third prize. First prize went to Peta-Lee Woolf, who designed a buoyant number adorned with letters of the alphabet and springs.
Forget haute couture; this show was strictly hardcore. But while these forays into the Addams Family of Fashion and beyond wouldn’t have been suitable for a dinner party, they provided a spectacle of fashion sensationalism. I’ve already booked my ticket to Cape Town for the World Finals on November 17. But I’m going armed with medical insurance. If the show offered a taste of tomorrow, then the fashions of the future will be not simply to die for, but to die from.