SA Fashion Week presented a new home and welcome returns

With a new home at the Melrose Arch Precinct, SA Fashion Week’s (SAFW’s) Autumn/Winter 2025 (AW25) season was one of welcome returns, relabelling and a pinch of romanticism. Amanda Laird Cherry introduced the renaming of her label to Amanda Laird Cherry Apparel (ALCA). It’s a refresh that continues the label’s ethos of wearable stories and documented cultures through cloth.

The fashion house presented a menswear collection of everyday unisex garments with hints of feminine fabrication and tailored utility.

With menswear leading the season (the Scouting Menswear competition was part of the showcase) utility is a mainstay in men’s casual designs. In the SA sense, it can represent the industrious culture of the working class. The ALCA collection is engineered and ergonomic — comfortable with interchangeable garments for versatile styling. Culturally this can be matched to the versatility of millennials who work for multiple streams of income in today’s gig economy.

Comfort can also mean wide-legged and roomier pants, which featured in a number of collections. Roomier pants are trending, but locally they are evolving. We know the comfort and agility of a Superella trouser, and labels such as Floyd Avenue Apparel are refining this style with impeccable craftmanship. This season Floyd Avenue’s Floyd Morapedi Manotoana won best designer from the Isuzu luxury collections for the label’s durable, sophisticated and edgy designs. The label stretched the boundaries of designing with denim - a dominant feature of SAFW AW25 as seen with other designers such as Fikile Sokulu and The Bam Collective playing with the material. Floyd Avenue is the 2015 winner of the SAFW Scouting Menswear competition.

Artho Eksteen, the 2021 winner of the SAFW New Talent Search Competition returned with a collection boasting the romanticism of nature. Having established himself with a signature of fantastical, ugly-beautiful designs that are deconstructive with an arty juxtaposition of fabrics and storytelling, his new collection played with prints that highlight the serenity and romance of ponds, rivers and streams, paired with shimmering, sequinned, lacy and woolly textures.

The revival of Sheldon Kopman’s Naked Ape was a welcome treat. As iconic for shaping the history of SAFW as the likes of Ephymol, Mantsho and Black Coffee, Kopman’s Afro Monk collection was a combination of the majestic, luxurious and streetwise. There was a spiritual tone too, with a print inspired by the Ethiopic (Ge’ez) numbers.

“I have been using the number 1 of this text for a few years and decided to extend these numbers into a print,” Kopman said.

Spirituality and luxury were accented in the colour white, the natural fabrics and the flowing silhouettes of the designs. The Afro Monk collection is multifunctional with an artisanal flair seen in the intricate embroidery and hand-knitting.

In the few years that SAFW has called for the creation of original prints as a way to grow the local textile industry, a number of designers have responded with using label names as prints. This gives way for a debate in luxury on preferences for loud labelling or subtle signatures. What this response means could have something to do with the idea of ownership in a country known for its history of dispossession.

As a leading platform for the business of ethical fashion, SAFW is also nurturing. Palesa Mokubung’s Mantsho celebrated 20 years this season. It’s gratifying to see the gradual growth of designers such as The Bam Collective and Fikile Sokhulu pushing their boundaries, new designers such as E-Mania getting close to shaping their voices and newer talents such as Ellen Madie starting to emerge.

Highlights included a Viviers showcase — a dense AW25 collection of conceptual earth-conscious clothing and storytelling. The sophisticated craftmanship, quirky nuances, diverse fabrics and shapes — from shimmering soft metallics, romantic laces to voluminous silhouettes — were a delight to the senses.