South Africa’s Soweto gets its fashion week (Part II)

South Africa’s Soweto gets its fashion week (Part II)

James, dressed on the day he was interviewed in a purple tartan bow tie and eye-popping blue shoes, also favours the bright colours 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, has given 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 wash out blues and greys 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 sell for rags. It’s soft cotton that dyes beautifully, Lehlabi said.

She takes the brightly checked vinyl bags impoverished travellers 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-type; its street couture," Lehlabi said.

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 colour, and his fabrics range from denim to Lycra. Monnakgotla said he brings
"something ghetto, something funky" to Soweto Fashion Week.

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Posted by Fahad Zafar on May 24 2012. Filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry