Posing on a plinth with his thick, tattooed knees poking out of baggy shorts, Barend de Wet made for an unusual sight at this year’s SA Fashion Week Winter Collections show at Arts on Main two weeks ago.
Comfortably as far from elegant as a creature can get, the artist installed himself and two models wearing vaguely Amish designs by David West right at the entrance to the chic bar en route to the runway. The photographers adored him; the beautiful people winced a little; the art aficionados rolled their eyes.
De Wet’s performance, conceived as an event that would dissolve the boundary between art and fashion, formed part of this year’s ambitiously themed SA Fashion Week programme, which sought to create a dialogue between fashion and art.
With the slogan “The Heart of Fashion”, the programme set out to demonstrate a fundamental connection between art and fashion as highly visual creative disciplines. Anticipating the pitfalls of collapsing the two, creative director Vincent Truter qualified that with the statement that the event was “not so much a fusion of fashion and art, but a dialogue between the two”.
The basis for Truter’s discretion was well illustrated by De Wet’s performance. Too poorly conceived to be taken seriously as art and lacking any noteworthy engagement with fashion, the performance fell, with a flabby plop, somewhere between the two. Unfortunately, many of the other attempts at a “dialogue” were just as insipid, but worse off, because they lacked De Wet’s self-deprecating humour.
Some items on the Winter Collections programme — those that were distinctly art or fashion — were more convincing than this. House of Ole captivated an unfortunately small audience with an exquisite range of men’s suits constructed out of fine cashmere and vintage fabrics, finished off with quirky details. It also managed to get the shoes right, which, astoundingly, cannot be said for the majority of the shows I watched. The price tags of countless pairs of high heels still clung to their cheap plastic soles and, in the most profound shoe horror of all, on more than one runway, crowish toes hung over the edges of the peep toes.
Colleen Eitzen, Amanda Laird Cherry, Two and Loxion Kulca gave polished shows of eminently wearable designs (except for a striped dress by Two, about which another critic quipped must have been made for pregnant convicts). But in general there was little experimentation or innovation on the runway, aside from Clive Rundle’s superb finale show.
Based on the concept of Braille as a tactile system of meaning that exists in place of the visual, Rundle’s garments were heavily textured with lace-up details, embroidered patterns, ruffles, knots and pleats, using contrasting materials. Rundle choreographed the show with an enchanting and mournful arrangement of songs for voice and violin performed by Zolania Mahola and Kyla-Rose Smith of the band Freshlyground. This aspect of the show, with the distinctive tassel fringes obscuring each model’s eyes, reminded the audience of the centrality of senses other than sight to the experience of a garment.
A highlight of the visual art programme was Malagasy artist Joel Andrianomearisoa’s improvised outdoor performance, Cut Cute, which took place just before Clive Rundle’s runway show. Andrianomearisoa constructed an “architecture” of ribbon, tape, plastic and paper using the bodies of stationary models as structural pillars. He is interested in the architectural sensibility implicit in fashion: clothes are essentially small, private, soft buildings in which the body is concealed, protected and decorated.
Though it was unclear to some audience members where exactly the fashion was in this show, Cut Cute expertly executed the theme of SA Fashion Week Winter 2011 Collections. Instead of an attempt to cut art and fashion from the same cloth, it was an instance of art speaking to fashion. For now, Clive Rundle’s show may have been the only time fashion spoke back, but these two examples suggest that there is at least room for conversation.