Jackie Burger creates oasis within the swirl of changing trends

The frenetic pace of our media-driven world means that as consumers of design, we take for granted the multiple collections displayed at different times of the year, available live on the internet and afterwards dissected in detail by bloggers, journalists and celebrities.

Once only the purview of the privileged few, the democratisation of fashion due to advances in technology has meant that design, art and fashion are not only available to anyone with an internet connection, but the growing pace at which design is being created and then disseminated adds hysterical fever to an already-hyped industry.

While this brings with it global accessibility and other benefits, it has become impossible to keep up with the fashion world’s frenzied pace. Additionally, this has inspired an environmentally detrimental buying cycle and demand for quantity of clothing over quality of design, as the fashion-conscious acquire and shed wardrobes seasonally in an effort to remain on-trend.

In line with the global trends of slowing down, increased mindfulness, and values-based business, Jackie Burger (ex-editor of Elle magazine SA) is, through her start-up, Salon 58, working to create a new voice in fashion amid the endless swirl of changing trends and enervating whirlpool of collections. As a content creator, she wonders, “How much time do we give the audience or consumers to appreciate, distil and own new content? The layerdness of the experiences means that the consumer is overwhelmed.”

Additionally, there is the question of whether, in a “madness of over-consumption and continuous newness” we ever take the time to revisit the legacy, history and “archived nature of where each piece starts”. It was with these thoughts in mind, when sitting on a sofa in Coco Chanel’s private Parisian salon, that Burger was struck with the idea to take the values of traditional 
salons home to SA by hosting soirées at which ideas could be exchanged, dialogue and collaboration encouraged and fashion experienced in a real-time, interactive way.

Her years at the helm of a global fashion title and experiences both in commercial fashion retail and content publishing were a vital education. “I’ve really been reflecting on how fortunate I’ve been in my career, especially my time at Elle. My later years were an education because I was schooled with diverse skills sets, from publishing to content and fashion, and it gave me a different perspective.” After decades as an icon in the South African fashion industry, Burger now has a way to “slow down and come up for air, and to walk my talk”.

She says, “I found the one element that was missing for me in content rendering was the art of conversation, where you can sit and talk and it becomes a dialogue. That’s where the origins of salons actually started because that liberated conversation and it had a ripple effect on how people experienced things. When you read, it can be a two-dimensional experience but when you really converse, you provoke a process and that, then, if you allow yourself to follow it, it evolves into something new. It’s very, very layered.”

The birth of haute couture fashion shows involved interaction and conversation – members of a small audience were able to view clothes on models and discuss specifications, fabric and measurements with the designer. During the same time, in elegant Parisian apartments, salonnieres hosted soirées for society’s thought leaders, at which world-changing ideas were animatedly discussed.  Burger’s modern, South African reincarnation of the concept is based in Stellenbosch, but its regular events are not limited to the physical salon.

Stylist Juanita Kotze describes Salon 58 as a ”collaboration between like-minded beings who all share a vision and who needed to create a platform where we could express and share these conversations in various aesthetics”. Therefore, the salons allow audiences to actively engage in dialogue, instead of merely consuming design. Having hosted five events since the company’s inception, the business is firmly based on a refined value system that Burger is gradually uncovering post-Elle.

She says, “I’ve done five, and they’ve involved sustainability, slowing down, and curation. It’s really experiential content rendering – presenting a live magazine where you almost are in the pages.” In November, Salon 58 hosted a magic-themed soirée in the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden (now open to tour by appointment).

Although Burger originally had a different venue in mind, a fortuitous visit to the garden and an encounter with Lewis’s philosophy of accessing the wildness of our nature amid an urbanised world stirred her deeply. The garden, a joyous celebration of nature in which flora is carefully paired with Lewis’s awe-inspiring sculptures, was also the perfect setting for Burger and her team to showcase  eight trailblazing South African designers by inviting them to re-imagine pieces from their archives, thus commemorating their history while exploring the themes of repurposing and upcycling.

Burger says: “In modern fashion content, we focus just on what’s happening now, the output, and we’re so busy chasing the new and the new designer that we forget that this infrastructure in its infancy exists because of trailblazers. Looking at their stories – whether Black Coffee, where Jacques always looked at repurposing Xhosa ribbon or Clive (Rundle) who’d buy shirts from Meltz – all of them have always had a love for vintage fabric… It’s about conscious living for me.”

As well as the more practical aspect of sustainability, the ability to draw on a fashion house’s past collections and to build a rich heritage is, for Burger, “so much part of the richness of the international design offering. Whatever happens it is always contextualised.” The success of South African fashion design, built on the foundations of committed innovators who have worked through the issues of a historically limited infrastructure, meant it was difficult to choose just eight to showcase at November’s event.

Eventually, Burger and stylist Juanita Kotze ear-marked iconic national designers Clive Rundle, Marianne Fassler, Black Coffee, Superella, KLûK CGDT, Vesselina Pentcheva, Suzaan Heyns and Karen Ter Morzhuizen, who they felt had remained consistent with their unique vision within the movement of trends throughout their career, and had worked to overcome the challenges of a growing economy.

The designs, on models carefully placed in the gardens like large-scale, fashion-forward fairies for the audience to discover (themselves clad in ethereal dresses and sneakers) were paired with Adidas Originals. Burger says: “For me, a brand like Adidas represents the modern, the functionality, the mobility. But still within that, giving us that balance of the wild.”

Kotze, who was responsible for interpreting the reimagined designs within the garden setting, remembers, “It all just magically came together. We had a breathtakingly beautiful, curated space – each of the designers gave a signature piece that I could interpret with the various settings on location. The Adidas collection was an on-trend match in movement and style. Hair and make-up completed each story in finer detail and the eight exquisite models held every installation picture perfect.

There lies great power in collaboration.” As well as the overt themes of sustainability and conscious living within a magical setting, the event was also a subtle statement that marked the journey of the South African fashion industry, and the progress it has made. Burger says: “African fashion is incredibly exciting.

Something that I’ve been watching for some time is how we’ve moved from curios and crafts – fashion always had to involve prints – and how our designers have taken those elements and modernised them, putting them into a strong, bold aesthetic.” She believes that as both content providers and consumers, we need to make conscious decisions about wearing local designs, instead of consistently defaulting to either mass-market fashion or international talent.

“We need to strip away the ego and politics and all the nonsense that is keeping our designers back in SA and Africa. We also need to wear our design and make more informed choices every now and then, instead of just lusting after the latest trends.” Additionally, there is a need for nationwide platforms that will assist designers to further their businesses.

“How do we empower an infrastructure for our designers to trade, and educate the consumers to really appreciate (their designs) so that they don’t think it’s too expensive but understand the work and design value of one-off signature pieces?” Unfortunately, home-grown talent is often ignored by South African fashion media in a race to present both accessible trends and international designs.

Although this is changing, Burger says, “A big percentage of magazines that offer fashion pages play to what they think the audience wants instead of visually stimulating an appetite for good-quality, local design.” Burger’s salons – themselves living art – speak to a new creativity, where concepts are distilled through the work of talented team members (and ultimately the audience) to become dynamic perspectives from which team and audience members can form something new.

“The essence of where I’m at, at the moment, is that creativity spins differently and it’s not owned, it’s a thought, an idea that we all share. Everybody adds to it and enriches it as we each give our own take on it. In this way it becomes a fulfilling and enriching experience because it’s a philosophy (whether re-purposing, upcycling or being inspired by nature) that is filtered through many creative processes and the more you filter it, the more aware of it you become and you can look at it differently.”

Just over a year after the founding of the company, the underlying values with which it was founded – sustainability, collaboration, creative entrepreneurship – have remained, but are evolving with the brand.

“It’s going to morph again. The essence of conversation and curation will stay the same but what I also wanted to do was to stop being predictable and to work and stay clear from working in strict boundaries of business operations and become a very fluid, organic entrepreneur because that is also a creative process that we don’t really get to practise enough. If we unlock an entrepreneurial economy, we will see far greater growth and initiative – people will consume with different consciousness.”

According to Burger, business is far more than merely figures, or a business plan. New business can and does involve an integrity of spirit and in the 21st century, entrepreneurs have “a responsibility of value-based business and mindfulness of what we create”.

A large part of business development is an unswerving focus on Salon 58’s target market in an attempt to serve it with a layered experience of fashion that is simultaneously inspiring and wearable. Burger says: “Straddling all of that is the audience, the women. I’m allowing myself to really speak out as a woman who is older and wanting to impart the richness that I was given, from a career and personal development point of view, and maybe in a way to share that with women through the art of conversation.”

Salon 58 will continue to provide differentiated experiences this year, although Burger is as yet unsure as to exactly what form they will take. “I don’t want it to ever become stale so I’m hesitant to over-think it and I also want to try and stay as close as possible to the zeitgeist (as opposed to trends, although 
understanding them is important). The key to me is to keep to where the salons started and that’s what made the salons develop some of the most written-about ideas – they may not have been iconic themselves, but they had phenomenal influence.” Jackie Burger has found her voice – and we look forward to hearing more of it.

salon58.co.za. Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden, 021 880 0054. dylanlewis.com