Charl Blignaut
`I’m a bit of a tart,” says Marianne Fassler as I settle against a plastic blow-up cushion embedded with pink flowers on a big old chair in her elegently kitsch Johannesburg lounge.
“I think I know how to promote myself in the media. Put it this way, I’ve always had good press. But, in a sense, fashion is a bit like journalism. You’re always having to work on two or three stories at once, there’s never the budget to really develop just one project.”
Still, somehow Fassler mysteriously manages to design, mount and promote a new range while also running a business, serving clients, handling a home and packing off the designer orders.
But if there’s one thing that strikes one about meeting Fassler properly for the first time, it’s the no-nonsense glint of the sensible businesswoman in her eye. After years on the social circuit approvingly eyeing one another’s hair colour, you kind of expect a huggie luvvie introduction. But not Fassler. There’s a reason she has retained her status as – arguably – South Africa’s most original and enduring designer and it’s the package.
The Marianne Fassler I meet on the Tuesday after the second South African Fashion Week is at once an artist and an entrepreneur; an intuitively feminine designer who keeps one eye on market trends and the other on her muse. She’s fresh as a daisy (deep purple from the tip of her dyed hair to the paint on her toenails); comfortably wizened; eclectic in taste and even more so in personal philosophy. Like her clothes, she’s the real thing – knocky and gorgeous.
Fassler’s show confirmed everything I’ve always thought about what makes a designer great: intuition. Hell, anyone who can combine an oriental pink top with a puppyshit brown skirt; Tretchikov with Tom Waits; the blandest sweaters with the leopardest of prints – and then mix it through a soundtrack that goes “I am a very stylish girl” – has got to know where she’s at.
In a sense SA Fashion Week is all about the Fasslers of our “somewhat thin rag trade”. It is emerging as a genuinely essential platform that is able to focus maximum media and buyer attention on what it is that makes the local design idiom unique.
As the top local designers showcase a sometimes clumsy attempt at Africanising their ranges, Fassler pushes the boundaries, playing with the curio value of Africa yet all the while exposing her roots – “the pulse of the city, you know, what it is about living here and walking downtown in Africa” – and her basic sense of the trendy. Let’s face it, Fassler was using 50/50 black and white models in 1976 already.
Despite the frustrations – miserable ticket sales, unenthusiastic buyers, ignorant press, too little sponsorship, too few emerging black designers, the usual – the organisers of the event, Lucilla Booyzen and Estelle Cooper, are wildly enthusiastic about what went down last week.
They are fully aware that fashion week has finally settled in on the calendar and that designers are beginning to realise the potential of marketing their talents and mounting more theatrical shows.
This time last year, Booyzen and Cooper were cautiously optimistic. This year – as Fassler and I sit in her lounge and talk about why Gaultier rules – they are already meeting to plan 1999.
“The clothes,” enthuses Cooper when I contact her. “The clothes were just amazing. There’s this earthy, oriental thing in the air. Free-spiritedness was the mood of the moment. Not restraint. You can be anything you want to be, you know. This year it was clear that we can choose our own direction.”