The annual Sanlam SA Fashion Week, which runs at the Sandton Convention Centre until September 19, allows the industry to pay homage to its most cherished designer labels –names such as Thula Sindi, Luna, Stoned Cherrie and Ruby.
But this year there are new names and debuts to be made — and in the spotlight is Gugu Mlambo Msomi’s label, Gugulam. The label was launched this week, but that doesn’t mean Msomi is a newcomer to the rag trade. ‘I’ve been head of wardrobe for Generations and before that I did work at Backstage,” she says.
She has also been a stylist for magazines, music videos, adverts ‘and those sorts of things”. Her winter collection for fashion week was inspired by her travels to Thailand: ‘I have given it an African-Eastern twist because I was recently there and came back highly inspired.”
The colours of the collection are muted, but with a lot of layering, structure and edge. ‘When I was a little girl I used to love funk, so I am always thinking about making my clothes edgy.” But she says putting the collection together in a month has been a nightmare.
Msomi gets her inspiration from ‘the places I go to, the food I eat, the people I meet — and where I see the need. Creating characters is what I enjoy.” This year sees an inaugural Bridal Africa event being hosted alongside fashion week, bringing this lucrative area of design closer to the haute couture platform.
Another development is the arts and culture fashion fusion event, in collaboration with the department of arts and culture. The initiative actively promotes collaboration between rural crafters and designers and has gone some way to establishing a network of collaborative groups.
This year Black Coffee has been one of the nine leading South African fashion labels to launch a fashion fusion collaborative collection.
The 2009 winners of the Mercedes-Benz award for fashion were paired with crafters from different provinces around the country, but it was their pairing with a group of seven crafters from Witbank that helped put Black Coffee’s collection together.
‘We have developed some great products,” says Daniça Lepen, who shares design duties with Black Coffee founder Jacques van der Watt. After winning the Mercedes-Benz award at the beginning of the year, Black Coffee developed an installation with the theme ‘Modern South
Africa”, which led to a range influenced by the traditional dress of the Xhosa and the Himba — the nomadic tribe from Namibia. ‘Our collection incorporates handprinting, wrapping and hand-dying,” says Lepen.
Faces have been covered with oversized helmets and nets combining contemporary colours, beading and printing.
Other designers appearing this year include the veterans: Clive Rundle, Abigail Betz, Terence Bray and Amanda Laird Cherry. Then there are the wacky and the extraordinary, among them the award-winning team Ziemek Pater and Carlo Gibson of Strangelove.
The Strangelove website notes that the two designed the outfi ts for the 2004 South African Olymic team and that, in the future, Gibson will be the sole owner of the Strangelove label.
At last year’s fashion week Strangelove won the Tropika@Play Style Wars competition, which had eight of the country’s top designers battling it out to create outfi ts made from recycled materials. ‘In minutes we made boxing gloves, a wedding dress and an evening dress,” says Gibson.
For the winning designs, the duo received a two-week all-expensespaid trip to fashion weeks in New York and Paris and the opportunity to debut their Tropika@Play beach-to-club wear range at this year’s fashion week.
The collection is aimed at people 18 and older with a ‘young-love boat feel to it,” he says. All the designs in the collection are multifunctional, so ‘it could be a skirt for the beach, which when pulled up becomes a dress”, says Gibson. ‘The general public is conservative,” he says, ‘but Strangelove isn’t just crazy.
We only do crazy a few times a year,” says the designer, who is equally at home with plain cotton as he is with religious iconography and industrial materials.
For details about this weekend’s Sanlam South African Fashion Week go to www.sanlamsafashionweek.co.za