Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin fleetingly braved the catwalk on Wednesday evening when he walked to the podium at the opening of this year’s Design Indaba Expo in Cape Town.
”It’s the first time ever [that] I’ve walked on the catwalk,” he joked, adding that while he might survive, ”whether the fashion industry would survive” was not so certain.
Erwin said South Africa was a diverse, complex country with many riches and also travails and its inhabitants would have to be ”a really foolish lot” not to make a success of it.
He said the Department of Trade and Industry would continue supporting the Indaba Expo, until when one walked into a hotel it was redolent with South African designs and until a BMW exported to Japan had some South African designs in it.
Earlier, expo founder Ravi Naidoo welcomed the fashion cognoscenti to the expo, which featured the leading South African designers across a range of products, including craft, fashion, media, film and architecture.
Naidoo said it was time for South Africans to ”shrug off old parochial mindsets” and embrace a new fashion-conscious country.
”(We) need to create a design consciousness in this country … we need to have discerning customers,” he said, appealing to those in the international industry to go back to their almae matres so that the standards of design could be raised.
The expo, in its seventh year, takes place at the Cape Town Convention Centre until Sunday.
Compere and CNN anchor Anand Naidoo described the expo as the ”biggest of its kind in the world” which would grow even bigger during a process of natural evolution.
The focus of the expo was competitive creativity and design consciousness, with designers selected for the standard of their work and products. – Sapa