Models strutting along the slopes of an artificial Table Mountain decked in high-fashion garments made of recycled plastic, tin and feathers drew a big crowd at the Earth Summit’s cultural hub on Thursday.
As the sun went down in a leaden sky, the Ubuntu (friendship) village sprung to life with African music, dance and the fashion show sponsored by the Cape Town city council to demonstrate the value of disposable waste materials.
One sensational outfit was a silvery skirt made of
3 800 safety pins and tinfoil, with a green string and foil top, attached to wings of black cardboard and broken glass.
A dress put together out of pieces of mirror and chain looked as it had been moulded onto the model, while another was decorated with bent cans and beads.
The designers, students from Cape Town schools, even had a wedding dress made of foil strips in their collection — ranging from stylish to bizarre — and a veil of clear plastic, adorned with paper flowers.
But the most popular model of the evening was not one of the girls wearing outrageous outfits but a man dressed in a bubble-wrap gown, tipping a hat made of the same packaging material.
The crowd burst into applause and whistled, as he twirled on the catwalk next to the six-metre model of Table Mountain — one side of which is painted amber and the other blue to depict the flipsides of pollution and environmental preservation.
The Cape Town exhibition, built around the mountain, is a comprehensive display of the city’s work on the environment and the challenges it confronts.
Before the fashion show, Cape Town deputy mayor Belinda Walker accepted a collection of signatures from dozens of other mayors promising to clean up their cities.
They were collected by polar explorer Robert Swan during a meandering 12 000-kilometre trip through South Africa, starting in Cape Town and ending up at the summit in Johannesburg.
Swan and his ”Mission Antarctica” yacht made the overland journey to raise HIV/Aids and environmental awareness among young people, in partnership with local anti-Aids organisation LoveLife.
By his side was ”Penguin Polo”, a man in a giant penguin suit, symbolising a penguin Swan rescued from oil pollution in Antarctica.
Swan attended the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago and swore to come to the 2002 summit with a something positive.
He fulfilled this commitment six months ago when he led a team of students in cleaning up, in freezing conditions, 1 000 tons of rubbish from the southern continent’s frozen wilderness. – Sapa-AFP