Alex Sudheim
The 1999 Durban Designer Collection was a bold attempt to knock fashion from its elitist perch and teach it how to live by its wits on ground level. One of South Africa’s most prominent style events celebrated its 20th birthday this year by throwing the silky plumed bird of fashion out of the nest and on to the street.
Having to undergo a crash course in urban survival strategy, just how swiftly and adroitly did this delicate creature adapt to the unforgiving elements of the concrete jungle?
Judging by the ranges that moodily stalked the landing strip-like catwalk spanned across an indoor Olympic swimming pool, one would have to say not very well.
For the greater part of the event, fashion continued to preen itself in the shadows, too timid to venture into the throbbing heat and dust of the street. And, on most of the occasions when it did, the inner- city kids played with it too roughly and made it cry for mama.
Based on a specific concept instead of just being a parade of nice clothes, the DDC this year undertook to operate according to the spirit of “fusion”. The ranges and styles had to be relevant to a rawer, rougher trope of urban folk, not just subscribers to Elle and Vogue. The “fusion” principle is that, in order to survive and prosper, fashion must allow itself to be invaded by the coarse energy of the street. It must scrape its lily-white knees on the tarmac and muddy its gossamer threads in the gutter.
Fashion can no longer be one thing, but must be everything. It must fuse with art; it must fuse Africa with Europe and the East; it must fuse yesterday with tomorrow; it must fuse street with sophisticated; and, above all, it must fuse ethereal fantasy with harsh reality.
But when one advocates the need to plunge into the seething melting-pot of polyglot identity, it is no good just dipping your toes into the cauldron.
It is on this score that the DDC was more often a disappointment than a revelation. Though the idea was a winner, its translation into deed reflected a stubborn allegiance to the old ways and a deep fear of going the whole hog. While a fundamental paradigm shift in the concept of fashion was on the cards, what emerged was more a kind of schizophrenia as new modes of expression were dabbled with but on the terms of the old.
And, as Pandora and her box proved, radical ideas are not to be flirted with, but committed to.
Far from upsetting the traditional proprieties of a fashion show, the ranges at the DDC – with a few notable exceptions – endorsed convention in their style of presentation. Wave after wave of skinny, saturnine models came stalking down the runway, doing their best to look morbid and bored in tight-fitting clothes.
If Rashad Khan wanted to subvert the sari by swathing the garments with Kama Sutra prints by artist Asiya Swaleh, wouldn’t it have had greater impact and relevance if his models were the middle-aged Indian housewives whom one generally associates with wearing saris? If the establishment is to be shocked it must see itself represented in brutally real terms, as political statements are hard to be taken seriously when they are wrapped around scrawny waifs.
In the newly instituted Loose Cannon category, Marcel Duvenage and James Beckett flirted with totalitarian chic and attempted to explore the complexities of fascism and sexuality in their range of Muslim gear. Yet they ought to have been way more radical and controversial in their approach in order not to look like Calvin Klein goes to Teheran. In fact, the entire Loose Cannon category suffered from a lack of real bite, even though it was created to lend fashion the hip cachet (and hopefully sting) of conceptual art. More con than conceptual, the ranges failed to live on the edge, and on the whole played it far too safe and self-conscious to deliver a welcome slap in the face.
Once again, an idea with great potential was lost in the translation, and the fuse of the loose cannon never really got lit.
However several moments of inspiration and originality were to be found in the Young Designer and Invited Designer categories. In the former section, designer Caroline Marshall and sculptor Sarah Lovejoy transformed the ramp into a spooky, cinematic tableau of post-apocalyptic devastation, with the models strapped to limbless mannequins and dead-eyed masks.
Tamlyn Martin and Liza du Plessis were two of the few who properly explored fashion’s potential as a conceptual art form, with their detritus-as-clothes range evoking a bleak sense of abandonment, fatigue and despair.
In the prestigious Invited Designer category, Amanda Laird-Cherry deservedly walked away with the laurels. Breaking the stylised rhythm of the sulky ramp-prowlers, Laird-Cherry’s show opened with an explosion of activity as a coterie of men – who could have been mine or municipal workers – hollered and pranced about the catwalk. This was followed by the range proper, which more than any other intelligently examined, questioned and engaged with the notion of “fusion” without mindlessly embracing it.
The deliberate lack of synergy in Laird- Cherry’s bantu blazer-chic look reflected a wry, ironic insight into the flipside of fusion, which is dissonance and incongruity.
Another who impressed in this category was Laurie Holmes, whose fatboy loosewear was a relief from the super-skinny look almost everyone else is still so hung up on. One of the few ranges with a sense of humour, Holmes subverted his own radically functional look by placing the zips of many his of climate-resistant garments on the back.
Also fun were CNN, whose simple, unpretentious and functional gear paid witty homage to the three essentials of lasting hipno – socks, slops and shades.
Though DDC ’99 bravely attempted nuclear fusion of fashion and art in a distinctly Durban context, it was ultimately more of a victory of fashion over art. In physics, fusion is defined as “union of atomic nuclei to form heavier one, usually with the release of energy”. It seemed, however, that the nuclei of fashion and art weren’t bonded at the level of intensity required to detonate a nuclear explosion.
At various points during the experiment it looked as if the chain reaction required to unleash maximum destruction was about to take off, but it fizzled in the chamber and the city wasn’t blown into oblivion. But it’s a good thing Durban still stands, because next year perhaps we can shoot the sub-atomic particles around society’s accelerator at greater velocity to attain serious core meltdown.