Chris Roper
The Smirnoff International Fashion Awards proved one thing: the fashion world is almost always at least five years behind whatever is culturally and ideologically current. This was brought home to me forcibly when I took my seat and found myself impaled on a glass ashtray. They’re actually encouraging people to smoke in the auditorium, on the day when headlines proclaimed that Minister of Health Nkosazana Zuma is going to crack down on smoking in public places.
The anachronism of this social gesture is replicated in a many of the clothes. The theme given to the student designers is “metamorphosis”, which unfortunately seems to bring out the hackneyed, lame mythology in them. I never again want to be subjected to this much womb and egg imagery outside of a Nando’s advert. One designer has even gone the absurdly literal route, and has a veiled model trapped in a multicoloured cocoon who is liberated into butterfly-like life by a girl in Western garb. Don’t they know how dodgy that is?
And I’m not sure what Bo Derek has to do with metamorphosis – a lot of the models are wearing island wench couture – brown with swinging bits. This could be a result of the adventurous nature of the material used: goat, cat and human hair, corn seeds, hessian, bark, roof sealer, tapioca, stripped palm bark.Or it could be just plain boring.
The women designers have almost all interpreted metamorphosis as a return to the organic, which is a sad commentary on the efficacy of feminist theory. At least three designers are from the “tits get pics” school of fashion, so they do artful things with diaphanous materials.
The excited stir among the (exclusively male) photographers, and their concerted rush to get the shots, proves that journalism is way up there with the fashion world when it comes to being sensitive to gender issues. What am I saying! My choice quote of the evening, from a vulture-like fashion fundi perched on the edge of her chair, as yet another emaciated model teeters down the ramp: “Hmph, she’s at least 6kg too heavy for overseas”.
The show itself is pathetically limited; the industrial-look stage set is boring, nobody does anything inventive with the ramp and the screens to either side of the stage never live up to their multimedia promise, unless you count endless Smirnoff logos and largely irrelevant graphics.
And yet, some of the designers transcend these limitations. Second-placed Ncebe Sisusa, from Border Technikon, drew rapturous applause for his postmodern take on Zulu symbolism – an outfit of leatherette, PVC, nails and shiny silver sheet metal, accessorised with a huge silver shield and headdress. It is a kind of Shocker Zulu for the rave generation, hybridising perfectly the twin imperatives of the industrial inevitable and cultural continuance.
Pretoria Technikon’s James Moulder won with a frothy concoction, materials for which included egg albumen and tapioca, and which visually included spindrift wings and blonde wigs.
But, for me, the highlight of the evening was Natal Technikon’s Bongiwe Sontundu’s exquisitely nuanced creations of maribou feathers, PVC and silver mesh. The primary garment (each designer showed two) parodied the implied protective nature of women’s clothing, with hard, chainmail-like sections over sexually and ideologically vulnerable areas such as the genitals, breasts and backside.
The secondary garment, a blue polka-dotted evening dress, had the courage to be outrageously simple rather than simply outrageous. It also hinted at the tropes and conventions with which history and civilisation have invested the semiotics of fashion, and in its subtle folds and angles were all the manifestly overdrawn safeguards of the primary garment.
Sontundu’s work was also a refutation of the motto of the event: “If things don’t change, they’ll stay the same.” Her garments made the point that, no matter how you repackage, you’re still selling the same shit unless you learn to read it differently.