A delicate piece of metal thread in the Barok label resembles a needle, a symbol for all the painstaking handwork that goes into each garment. ‘It takes eight days to make one of these skirts,” says designer Merle Payne, who is busily pinning down a leaf shape cut out of baby blue kid leather.
Together with her sister-in-law Ingrid Pienaar, Payne has spent the last three years designing a colourful variety of skirts and shirts. Recently, they have branched into wall hangings and handbags.
They originally chose the name Barok because of the over-the-top embellishing, but it is also a pun: ‘ba” means ‘of” in SeSotho and ‘rok” means ‘skirt” in Afrikaans. Paying homage to the melting pot of South African cultures, Payne and Pienaar take patterns and detailing from different tribes and unite these in unique pieces of wearable art, on show next week in Johannesburg.
Everything is hand-crafted in Payne’s eccentric home-cum-workshop in the remote, but beautiful, Limpopo mountains. The light-flooded workshop is a designer’s dream: piles of every fabric imaginable cover the floor, chairs and tables; ribbons and buttons are sorted by colour and size; photos, drawings and other inspirational paraphernalia line the walls — and then there’s Payne’s vast collection of braids, prints and antique lace, remnants from her 18 years as a bridal-shop owner.
‘My mother taught me to love textiles and colour. I’ve been collecting cloth since my 20s,” says Payne, her grey curls the only thing giving away her 58 years. She wears one of her humourous skirts over trousers ‘as the young crowd does these days”. Her lips are painted red, two leather bands with spikes embrace her slender wrists and she jumps about the workshop in her black All Stars, closely followed by her giant black poodle, Petal. ‘I know style, I don’t know fashion. Why should some guy in Paris dictate to us what to wear every three months?”
Barok is not about fashion trends, it is about timeless quality and creating employment. Every morning at 7am, work begins as Payne and Pienaar are joined by local ladies who are experts in embroidery, sewing and stitching. ‘There are only three jobs a woman can do here, around Tzaneen,” says Payne. ‘She can work in the bottle store, at the chemist or have a function of minor importance in the timber industry. With the workshop, we try to provide a little indepence so these ladies don’t have to beg their husbands for every single penny.”
With a week until the upcoming Jo’burg exhibition, three employees are busy embroidering crocodiles, flowers and ornate geometrical patterns on to traditional Venda and Shangaan fabrics. A seamstress carefully fastens beads and buttons, Xhosa braid strips, Zulu-inspired studwork made out of cans and old-fashioned Indian mirrors believed to reflect negative energy. A Jolly Roger and a picture print of the Mona Lisa represent Western culture. ‘Tribes United” reads one of the wall hangings. People sometimes ask Payne if she’s not afraid of insulting some by using traditional elements like this in a modern garment. She is not worried. ‘If you celebrate something and love it passionately, how can you insult people?”
With all the handwork and detailing, every piece is unique. ‘If somebody truly loves an item that is already spoken for, we can make something similar, but never exactly the same. The uniqueness is part of the charm,” explains Pienaar, who studied fine art at Wits. For their exhibition, the design duo hopes to finish a few dozen skirts, some wall hangings and about 30 bags. ‘We want to keep standards high, so we only sell our garments in a gallery-type environment.”
The embellished textiles don’t come cheap. Skirts start at R1 800 and go up to R2 900. Payne and Pienaar regret the hefty price tags, but insist there’s no getting around those because of the painstaking needlework. ‘We never compromise on quality. I’ve had to hand-dye this rose appliqué, for example, because I wasn’t happy with the tint of red,” says Payne, admitting she is ‘a bit anal about detail”.
Realising that their clothes would only be for the happy few, Payne and Pienaar recently started working on smaller items. Barok handbags (R550) were a huge hit at the Design Indaba in Cape Town, where they sold like hot cakes. ‘In the future, we hope to bring down prices for the skirts as well so that more people can enjoy them,” says Payne.
The prices might be steep for clothing, but look at it as buying a piece of art and the price is not so bad after all.
Barok items will be on sale at Upstairs@Bamboo, cnr 9th Street and Rustenburg Road, Melville, Jo’burg, from May 8 to 17. Call 015 305 4511