Self-important soap stars, celebrity presenters and famous fashionistas jostle to take up their thrones in the rows of seats lining the catwalks at Johannesburg’s South African Fashion Week. You may not recognise them all from the country’s small pool of elites, but slick apparel, plastic smiles and a jaunty air secure their fame in the minds of lesser mortals.
Meanwhile, small crowds of young designers and enthusiastic fashion supporters huddle outside. At R150 a pop the, on average, 20-minute shows are beyond the financial reach of most and they are queuing in the hope that they will be allowed to fill the gaps in the back rows after the paid-for and sponsored seats are taken.
Fashion Week has come a long way since its inception nine years ago, with 70 designers participating this year. It is highly regarded as a premier fashion event and claims a fairly solitary position as a crusader for our creative design talent. This year the Departments of Trade and Industry and Arts and Culture resumed their positions, among others, as sponsors of the event, and made calls for the industry to move beyond being purely about cut, make and trim to developing labels that can be promoted in the global village.
It is all fine and well to make these calls and to praise our creative abilities, but where do the ‘back row” designers and even some of the established labels find themselves after four days of ‘air kissing” are over? Does Fashion Week live up to their expectations in terms of exposure and, more importantly, hard sales? And what is being done to bolster the potential of a fledgling industry that is vulnerable in the face of industrial monsters such as China, which can whip open a factory in just 26 minutes.
Katherine Mortner, winner of the Elle/Lee Cooper New Talent competition is delighted with the exposure she got from Fashion Week. A recent graduate, this was her first non-college show and she believes it has helped to get her ‘name out there”. ‘It is definitely a foot in the door … a lot of the right people have shown a lot of interest.”
Nomalanga Nyanda was a finalist in the same competition. She has been designing since 2001, supplies various shops in Jo’burg and has done freelance work for some of the bigger labels. Nyanda believes that Fashion Week should support young designers by giving them tickets to the shows. She says it is frustrating to wait in line for up to an hour and then maybe not even get in.
Less enthusiastic about the knock-on effects of Fashion Week is Carie Stevenson, designer for Tart, which supplies the Space in Rosebank and various shops in Cape Town. She rented a stall and, although she has made quite a few sales, is disappointed at the lack of trade and public exposure. ‘I decided to come to this Fashion Week instead of the one in Cape Town because I thought there would be more exposure to industry players and buyers. We were promised a buyers’ morning, but that hasn’t happened.” Stevenson says she doesn’t see herself returning to Fashion Week in a hurry. ‘It is exhausting and it is expensive,” she says.
A stall at Fashion Week costs between R2 800 and R45 360, while show costs range between R11 000 and R32 000. This excludes the cost implications of time, labour and materials, which proves prohibitive, even with sponsorship.
Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater of Strangelove have had shows at two previous Fashion Weeks but, despite the positive response they received, decided not to take part this year.
‘You have to remember that Fashion Week is a business,” says Gibson. ‘I’m not saying that it is wrong. They are doing a good thing by exposing people, but the whole thing is so expensive,” says Gibson. Pater adds, ‘Where we are right now it would make more sense for us to spend that money on an agent. Then we would have more control over getting in contact with an audience that is particularly there [to see Strangeloves’ garments]; at Fashion Week they are so far removed.”
For Paul Harris from Lunar, however, Fashion Week is an invaluable investment. Lunar was part of a three-designer show this year and managed to get sponsorship. ‘We took part in the 2002 Fashion Week and had huge success from that. We didn’t do it for the next two years because we didn’t have the funds but, for every Fashion Week we missed, I thought we should have been involved,” he says. ‘You are never going to get [the same volume of] press and buyers together anywhere else.”
For very new designers who haven’t really begun to think seriously about the financial intricacies of running a business, exposure is king.
Kgotso Maba graduated from Springs College and began a small business sewing clothes for people in his area. ‘There was no exposure,” he says. ‘ I was doing the same thing, but not getting anywhere.”
Maba is part of the Department of Art and Culture-backed Mzanzi Designers project, which aims to help design graduates capitalise on the skills they have learnt at tertiary institutions so that they don’t end up slipping unnoticed into their communities.
The project is still in its infancy, but Maba and 14 other project participants launched their careers under three labels at this year’s Fashion Week. ‘Here I can see what being a designer is really about,” says Maba.
Which brings us full circle to the ‘front row” hype. One model, who wasn’t ‘into fashion” but did modelling ‘for fun and for the girls”, related a story of how he was backstage with ‘four other guys”. They were discussing the clothes, the designers and the parties when one remarked, ‘Yes, but it’s a pity there are so many civilians.” It was a glib remark, but it struck me then that if proponents of fashion are really serious about creating a vibrant and lucrative environ-ment, that creates jobs and is able to compete in a global market, it wouldn’t hurt for fashionistas to stop tripping over their egos and focus, instead, on growing the industry.