SALON

Thursday, May 24, 2012 7:15 PM UTC

South Africa’s Soweto gets its fashion week

By

Topics: From the Wires,

South Africa's Soweto gets its fashion weekIn this photograph shot Saturday May 19, 2012, fashion models rehearse in a Johannesburg, South Africa residential neighborhood for the Soweto Fashion Week scheduled to start Thursday May 24, 2012. Designers and entrepreneurs who have gotten together to put on a fashion show in Soweto are inspired by the famed township's creativity and history.(AP Photo/Jerome Delay)(Credit: AP)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Struggling but deserving designers got a chance to show work inspired by the creativity and history of South Africa’s most famous township as Soweto’s first fashion week opened Thursday.

The township on Johannesburg’s southwestern edge was the natural place for a show for new designers, said 23-year-old entrepreneur and Soweto Fashion Week organizer Stephen Manzini.

“You walk around Soweto, you see creativity everywhere,” Manzini said.

Manzini didn’t ask designers to show extensive collections or charge them to take part, unlike the country’s more established fashion weeks. Fashion blogger Mahlatse James says this gives designers who have not yet made a name a chance to show their work to boutique owners and potential investors.

“Creatives from Soweto do need their own platform,” James said. “If the other fashion platforms cannot afford them that, they have to create their own.”

Manzini acknowledges Soweto Fashion Week is an ambitious title for his three-day showcase of 16 designers. Rehearsals were held in the parking lot and garden of a modest apartment borrowed from a tailor friend, in a northern Johannesburg neighborhood some designers found difficult to reach by taxi van, the main form of cheap mass transportation in South Africa.

“We refused to be stopped because we don’t have funding,” said Manzini, who raised 60,000 rand (about $7,500) from churches, business people and other sponsors for the event. His mother, a nurse, tapped her contacts and acted as chairwoman of the event, and is someone off whom he could bounce ideas, Manzini said.

Manzini is confident that in coming years, the event will grow to a full week and give many more designers an opportunity. He hopes to start his own business distributing designs from Soweto Fashion Week.

Valencia Mache, a 31-year-old legal adviser from Soweto who came to the first night Thursday, had this advice for the young designers: “Even if there’s no opportunity, make an opportunity.”

Her friend, 30-year-old businesswoman Jabu Mlangeni, said she last went to a fashion show years ago, far from Soweto in the upscale Johannesburg neighborhood of Sandton. Then, she said, she was cheering on David Tlale, one of South Africa’s best-known black designers. Thursday, she was just around the corner from her home, and said she was hoping to see the next Tlale.

Soweto has long been known for its quirky sense of style, with designers splashing bright colors and urban sensibilities on everything from the latest silhouettes on European runways to reworkings of the dapper suits Nelson Mandela wore when he lived in the township in the 1940s. The older Mandela is best known for his relaxed but colorful shirts. But as a younger man, the son of a royal family was a political celebrity in Soweto, and dressed the part.

“The style that Nelson Mandela rocked in his day,” and other looks from the 1940s and 1950s are popular among Soweto designers, said fashion writer James, who himself sports a shaved part in his hair, like Mandela had as a young man.

James, dressed on the day he was interviewed in a purple tartan bow tie and eye-popping blue shoes, also favors the bright colors and nerdy yet cool skinny silhouettes popularized by the Smarteez, a design collective from Soweto that has drawn international attention.

The designers in Manzini’s shows aren’t as recognizable as Smarteez. But the strikingly modern Soweto Hotel, one of Manzini’s sponsors, gave them a classy stage with an evocative history. The hotel where the shows will be staged sits on the square where, in 1955, South Africans of all races gathered to adopt the Freedom Charter, which proclaims: “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” Freedom Square is now a national monument.

For 29-year-old designer Tebogo Lehlabi, Soweto is “liberation. It’s freedom.”

Lehlabi has never before participated in a fashion week. She said she had not been confident enough in the past to seek such a showcase, but now hopes that boutique owners will see her designs in Soweto and seek her out.

“It’s a great opportunity. It’s a long time coming. There’s a lot of talent that’s going on in the townships,” said Lehlabi, who comes from another Johannesburg township, Alexandra.

“Soweto is coming along, it’s coming into its own” along with the rest of South Africa, Lehlabi said. “We’re an emerging identity. So, anything goes. It’s a young and fresh identity.”

She expresses her own identity in recycled materials and bits and pieces she finds at supermarkets and hardware stores. She dyes her clothing to washed out blues and grays that she says suggest Johannesburg’s smog and “that bleached look that you sometimes get just before it rains.”

Her collection for the Soweto Fashion Show includes sleeveless blouses made from cloth her local supermarkets sells for rags. It’s a soft cotton that dyes beautifully, Lehlabi said.

She takes the brightly checked vinyl bags impoverished travelers load onto buses and trains across Africa, and cuts them into pieces to use as decorative trim. Other embellishments are hand-woven from hardware store rope.

“I’m inspired by the working class. Because I am working class,” she said.

Each piece is painstakingly handmade.

But “it’s very street. It’s street couture,” said Lehlabi, who showed her collection Thursday.

Lehlabi turns subtlety and thrift into elegance. Collen Monnakgotla, 32, another designer, represents the other extreme of township ingenuity. He dresses men in bright blocks of color, and his fabrics range from denim to Lycra.

Monnakgotla said he brings “something ghetto, something funky” to Soweto Fashion Week.

More Donna Bryson.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments are not enabled for this story.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations