Waters
Nick Paul
Grey’s the next black and has been for some time now. The Seventies are still the Seventies, only more so. And the Blue Waters still belongs in that decade, the muted pastels of its Eighties revamp (albeit executed in the Nineties) notwithstanding.
And it’s still the same place it was when Claire, Tracy, Erica and Elaine invented irony in December 1982. In the brief interlude between school and the navy I hung out with these four exotic creatures, each a subtropical, teenage Dorothy Parker, although the name wouldn’t have meant anything to me at the time.
Of an evening we’d go and listen to English new wavers VHF at Ports O’Call in the Elangeni, where we’d drink Coco-Rico and Coke. My companions would be nasty about everyone there except us.
In the mornings we’d hang out at Battery beach, which was probably Durban’s campest daytime venue, the lawn carpeted with silky shorts, thongs and glistening buttocks. And then when the sun became unbearable, we’d wander over to the Blue Waters for a swim in the indoor pool and a coke in the huge round lounge.
We weren’t allowed to swim there, of course, but did anyway, saying that we were the people from room 174. The luxury of coming off Battery in 33C of humidity and into the welcoming darkness of the indoor pooldeck was irresistible. So was the decaying cheesiness of the place, though cheese and sleaze hadn’t yet been reinvented. The girls thought the place was hilarious, a cool 10 years before anyone else thought to laugh at anything tacky. I thought the girls were hilarious.
A few years later my friend Russell opened a nightclub, the Electric Circus, in Jaqueline’s singles bar downstairs and was quite the happening spot for a heady couple of months.
Anyway, the Blue Waters is back, thanks this time to Durban’s prt– porter wideboy and creative ritalin kid, Neil Roake, proprietor of the Durban Design Emporium (DDE). He held a show in the pool deck there on Wednesday last week, cheekily procuring the services of Josie Boraine and Georgina Grenville, among others, to model the ranges of the designers in the DDE stable. Georgina was a bit bland for my taste, Josie was haggardly gorgeous and enthusiastic, and grey was the new black.
Some did it marvellously well, notably Colleen Eitzen, winner at this year’s Durban Designer Collection, who gave us the same skinny dresses and clamdiggers that everyone else is at the moment, only better, and Amanda – ah, Amanda – Laird Cherry, who once again showed us that it’s possible to make truly beautiful clothes that men can wear, enjoy and feel masculine in. Nick Stanbridge’s CNN range looked like it might have come from a late, hip episode of the Brady’s, and he’s at least as much of a designer as an archivist, and Laurie Holmes is looking good to be a streetwear legend. Even the name – Holmes, it has something.
And the Blue Waters buzzed. Durban’s 23 trendiest people, and about another 30 from the second tier of cool brought the Coimbra bar alive again. The Siamese fighting fish in the tank in the middle of the bar swam a little more perkily. I had the feeling that the Blue Waters was flexing its wavy facade, and saying in smoky cocktail tones: “Now these are my kinda people.”