The pay-off line of SA Fashion Week is ”The Business of Fashion”, but programme director Dion Chang believes the real business will only start when designers’ ”houses are in order”.
And not only the designers. ”We need to get the textile federation, the clothing federation, the manufacturing arm and the Department of Trade and Industry to come to the table and say we’re going to help the local industry. They see it as small change, it’s not in their interests and it irks me terribly.”
This year, Fashion Week falls earlier than before. Chang is emphatic that the mid-winter runways will give smaller design houses enough time to meet summer deadlines. By projection, local designers will get their work into the country’s magazines by August or September, after which the garments will hit the racks.
Fashion Week is, after all, about summer — and tiny lumps of hail, a summer phenomenon, pelted Johannesburg this week.
The fashion week team has been doing some round-table thinking and has resolved to dispense with models from developed countries.
”In the last few years people have said let’s just concentrate on the export market and it’s just not viable,” Chang says. ”We went back to the drawing board and saw what the buying patterns are. International designers work a year in advance, but in South Africa that’s just a pipe dream. For another 10 years that’s not going to happen. We’re an embryo — ours is not even a fledgling industry.”
The major problem confronting local fashion is the inability to get all aspects of the industry working towards a common goal. SA Fashion Week is set up to ”lobby on [designers’] behalf until the giants take note”.
Chang talks of having spent two years begging buyers to come to the event that your average kugel would kill to attend. ”I’ve got scabs on my knees,” he says, ”but nada.”
But now there is progress. This year sees the entry of Woolworths, sponsor of this week’s show with top dogs Craig Native, Maya Prass and Stoned Cherrie. ”I really take my hat off to Woolworths,” Chang says. ”They’re taking these designers and they are helping them with manu-facture. They have a team of 36 people coming through — buyers, management, decision-makers.”
Woolworths’s involvement takes up from its participation in the Design Indaba, which took place in Cape Town earlier this year. While Woolworths won’t be producing the current ranges by these three designers, it will be launching an SA Designers at Woolworths range in November. Five stores are earmarked, including Eastgate, Sandton, Cavendish Square and the V&A Waterfront.
Chang is enamoured of Woolworths — proof of the fruitful partnership can be seen in his glowing smile on huge billboards in Woolworths’s stores. But he is not entirely happy with Edgars, the country’s biggest department store. While Edgars has sent a team of 18 to Fashion Week, it has held its commitment to local design in reserve. In his flamboyant manner, Chang hails Woolworths and proposes ”a little slap on the wrist for Edgars”.
Another complication hindering the progress of the local fashion industry is the strength of the rand. This year international guests will arrive from Switzerland, Britain and the United States. The Department of Trade and Industry, with a big presence at the event, has brought in a delegation from Germany and they will meet with designers en masse.
”I’m not holding my breath for huge orders,” Chang admits. ”I almost don’t want huge orders because, unless we’ve got the infrastructure to help these young guys, there’s no point.”
This is where the department and federations representing textile and clothing manufacturers can make a difference. ”We work with the Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union … in Cape Town, but because of the rand strengthening, the textile factories are shedding jobs massively, and we’ve got international interest and they don’t have the manufacturing capabilities. There’s a gap that needs to be addressed.”
Creatively, there’s no gap at all. This week’s edition of Newsweek magazine claims South Africa is the country with the greatest streetwear potential. Cult designer Craig Native, under the Woolworths banner, has decided to ”break the African stereotype”.
”We always think of beadwork and brown, earthy colours with particular references to ethnic and traditional tribes. I’m drawing on elements from the suburbs and not the townships. From Manenberg to Sandton. Sandton is also in South Africa — it doesn’t only have to be Soweto.”
More specifically, Native is using a ”sporting element — not from Newlands cricket ground or from the Absa Stadium”. Try to imagine chic Europeans dressed like Jozi soccer stars.