The photograph appeared in Tatler, in Prestige, in every society magazine that covered the wedding. Three thousand guests, one bride, and standing beside her, Raf Simons. The caption read: wedding dress by Dior. It was not by Dior. It was by a brand almost nobody had heard of, made by one person working from a dining table in Hong Kong. Philipp Althof and Budi Adji were not credited. They were not even mentioned.
“At first, obviously, we were like: all this work and look what it turned into,” says Philipp, one half of the design duo. “But those 3,000 people who wanted to know called up and asked who made the dress. And the word travelled very quickly.”
That was 2016. Today, Budism Couture occupies a 240-year-old heritage building on Bree Street in Cape Town: its showroom downstairs and its atelier upstairs, where dresses take between three and nine months to make. There are no fashion shows. No advertising. No billboards. If you know about Budism, someone who knows told you.
It is worth pausing on how unlikely this is. Couture, the kind associated with Parisian ateliers and the legally protected standards of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, does not conventionally come from Cape Town. Yet that is precisely where a South African banker and an Indonesian designer decided to build something resembling a Parisian couture salon.
Philipp grew up in Cape Town, went to the German school up the hill from where the atelier now stands, and spent years working in private equity and investment banking in Singapore and Switzerland. Budi studied at St Martin’s and Kingston University, worked for Hugo Boss, and taught himself to sew couture because there was nobody to teach him.
“I know how to sew in a zipper, I know how to make a dress,” he says, “but not couture. I just knew what it had to look like.” They met in Singapore 25 years ago and have, from different countries and different disciplines, been building toward this ever since.
The brand began with a dare. One of Budi’s first clients in Hong Kong challenged him to make her wedding dress. “If you mess it up, don’t worry, we have options,” she told him. He didn’t. The dress was worn to a reception of 3,000 guests. A magazine credited someone else. The enquiries came anyway.
When Philipp and Budi decided to leave Hong Kong, they didn’t move to Paris. They came to Cape Town. “South Africa has amazing potential,” says Philipp. “The talent is here. Right behind us is Bo-Kaap, and in Observatory you had all these garment factories that closed in the late ’90s, but the skill is still there.”
The first two people they hired knew how to make garments but had never made couture. Neither, formally speaking, had Budi. “There is no one to teach you here,” he told them on their first day. “I taught myself how to do this. And if I can teach myself, I will teach you.”
A few years later, a man wandered into the boutique after walking past on his way to dinner. He casually mentioned working for a costume institute before revealing he was a curator of costumes and textiles at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, working alongside Andrew Bolton. He spent nearly three hours examining garments, turning over seams and studying techniques. “You guys made your own story through self-learning,” he told them. “That is unheard of.”
The question “Why Cape Town?” produces a pause, but Philipp answers simply. After a week in Paris during Haute Couture Week, surrounded by Chanel campaigns and Louis Vuitton billboards, he returns to Bree Street and finds clarity. “It frees your mind,” he says. “It allows you to focus on the craft.”
Budi agrees. Living in London, he found the constant visual stimulation distracting. “You are influenced by the things you see every single day,” he says. “For someone so visual, it’s quite dangerous. You lose focus.” He points to Budism’s signature heel, protected by a US patent, as proof.
The shoe took two years to design. Two years of prototypes and abandoned ideas, of trying to find a signature feature in a market saturated with crystals and bows. Inspiration came instead from a sneaker. Specifically, from the tab you hook a finger through when you’re pulling it on. The loop became the language of the shoe, the stiletto continuing in one unbroken line into the back of the heel, forming what appears to be half a bow but is in fact a functional hold. Simple, patented, and, by Budi’s own account, something he would not have arrived at from anywhere more obviously fashionable.
A friend who owns Hurel, one of France’s oldest embroidery houses, told them they were crazy to base themselves in Cape Town. He called back the next day, having changed his mind. His reasoning was precise: couture is art, and art does not follow the same flow as mainstream fashion.
None of this, of course, is easy. Fabrics arrive from Italy and France. Even needles, pins and specialist yarn must be imported. Customs is a recurring character in the Budism story: Philipp had landed at OR Tambo only hours before our conversation carrying a toile when South African Revenue Service officials stopped him. “The fabric looks expensive,” they said. He pointed to the pins, to the unfinished seams. They were not entirely convinced.
Running a couture business in South Africa also means constantly explaining its value. “Unfortunately, South Africa is incredibly price-driven,” says Philipp. “Even couture clients ask, why should we pay that much? It’s made in South Africa.”
The shoes prompt the same conversation. His response never changes: they are not expensive; they are costly. They are made by artisans using exceptional materials, with details such as 2.5mm latex foam insoles that clients may never see but will certainly feel. “When people understand that,” he says, “they get it.”
Philipp’s years in finance inherently shaped how he thinks about value. He once spent his days moving money that wasn’t his. Now he makes objects whose worth is inseparable from the time and craftsmanship invested in them. “When we had a client who broke down in tears and said, ‘This is my dream’,” he says, “that raw emotion, you go like, yes. It’s worth it.”
The stories accumulate. A bride who had always dreamed of Dior but felt nothing during her Dior fitting, then cried during her final fitting with Budi. A woman who had not spoken to her mother in more than a decade, only for her mother to appear at the atelier for the dress reveal. A client in her sixties, marrying for the third time, who simply said, “You make me feel like a little princess.”
“Everything is so fast,” says Philipp. “For clients to sit here with a cup of coffee and have a chat, people can really decompress. The time we take is the true luxury.”
Philipp once described couture, stripped of its mystique, as simply meaning very well made. A nightgown can be couture. A jacket can be couture. What the word ultimately describes is not an address or a membership, but a quality of attention: the decision to make something as well as it can possibly be made, and to keep making it that way regardless of whether anyone is watching.
It’s an unusual destination for a banker from Cape Town and a self-taught dressmaker from Indonesia. But then, a former head of one of France’s oldest embroidery houses once told them they were crazy to try. He called back the next day. “The possibilities,” he said, “are actually endless. You could be anywhere. You might as well be somewhere you actually want to be.”
As it happens, they are. Right here, on a street in Cape Town, in a building that was a mess when they found it, making dresses that a magazine once attributed to Dior.
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Adapted from the August issue of Wanted, 2026.
