Feature
Fashioning Africa
Marquita Harris
For Palmi, working closer together means a compromise for prideful designers less inclined to show outside of their home bases. “I would love to see a Pan African fashion event, where the best from throughout Africa are given the opportunity to showcase their creative work and to use this as —a platform to develop the industry throughout Africa.”
Sponsor dilemmas have also created issues among designers struggling to get their due recognition. Although it’s quite expensive to do, many designers who show in more established fashion weeks have the option to show in another city, thus another fashion week (generating more publicity and followers). However, a common problem among smaller industries is that once a designer shows a collection, that is it. In order to show in another fashion week the designer must create an entirely different range of clothes. South Africa alone has six fashion weeks controlled by two companies. Palmi believes that this is why many designers end up suffering.
Designer Bonga Bhengu of label Jeanus also sites sponsor conflicts as another reason why Africa’s industry remains low key.
“We need sponsors to help us show outside of Africa because the African Government doesn’t [fund] designers showing [elsewhere,] unless they want to have political publicity,” he says. Bhengu has been in the business for 8 years designing bridal and pr-t-a-porter for a wide range of clients and currently shows in Durban Fashion Week. And while he has shown in New York- back in 2001- the expensive costs of setting up shop in Bryant Park is a cold reminder of why government subsidization could benefit these designers. “Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Mozambique” are just a fraction of the counties that he notes as being fashion-forward and could benefit from this action.
What is so ironic about this sector of the industry is that although it faces many hurdles and “fiefdoms” (as Kl-k and Du Toit would say), designers remain rooted here. While cities like Hong Kong, Melbourne and even London continue searching for incentives to keep designers within city limits, many designers are quite content in remaining an African commodity.
“Our goal is to market ourselves internationally, but use South Africa as a base,” says Kl-k and Du Toit.
Whether it’s from a business or a personal perspective one thing the designers all agree on is the beauty and continuing inspiration being a designer in Africa has.
“In South Africa [alone] we have 11 cultures living together and have 11 official languages. Each province has a culture that inspires,” says Bhengu. And this is only at the bottom tip of Africa-
-Marquita Harris
Marquita Harris is a features editor for the iPapier blog, you can view her work at iPapier.papierdoll.net.
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