The moths and the flames

The first time I attended New York Fashion Week (NYFW) was in February 2010 for the Fall/Winter collections. It was the height of North American winter and I’d never been to America, or seen snow in real life. As delightful as it was to frolic in the cloudy frost, I was so cold those first few days, my nose was bleeding all over town from the shock of the climate. I was 24 and wholly unprepared for my two-week trip, culturally and sartorially. It would also be my first brush with the city’s notorious loneliness.

Lucilla Booyzen, founder and director of SA Fashion Week, had found me a dream internship at Video Fashion. I got to watch the dress rehearsals for 3.1 Philip Lim, Prabal Gurung and Marc Jacobs’ shows among others. In a moment I will never forget, I shared an elevator with Kirsten Dunst at Milk Studios; and I arrived at another venue one evening and swooned past André Leon Talley, Whoopi Goldberg, Martha Stewart and J Alexander having a chat.

I’d come to New York as part of a prize I had been awarded at the 2009 Sanlam Journalism Awards for a story I had written for Elle Magazine about a Soweto fashion and creative collective called The Smarteez, who travelled in mobs looking like walking art. One of these Sowetans was a dance student named Manthe Ribane. The young Ribane would grow up to use her wide-ranging artistry to cultivate a cult following as a dancer, performer and interdisciplinary artist with her siblings as Dear Ribane.

I too would grow up, leave fashion and move to New York in late 2023 after becoming a filmmaker. But I never stopped wearing SA designers and I kept most of my friends in fashion, one of whom was Tsakani Mashaba, founder of the outstanding fashion and accessories label Ham Ethop. She called me last month to tell me that she, Ribane and three other designers from SA were coming to NYFW to present new collections as part of an initiative with Jaguar/Land Rover called “Give Her A Crown”. She asked me to send a list of my guests and she would see me on the other side.

The other side was a perfect autumn day in New York. I wore a 2013 Korean-style jacket and matching wide-leg trousers from Superella, a pair of black off-road limited edition Ecco sandals and my Ham Ethop Tiebele Arc bag.

As I walked towards the Berklee School of Music’s building on 41st Street, I saw an enchanting figure leaning on a giant silver suitcase. She had neck tattoos peeking from under a jet-black friar tuck wig and wore black cat-eye sunglasses, a black satin long-sleeve top with matching trousers and brown Gucci slides. As I walked closer, I got the kind of tingles you get from looking at the sun. “Well, well, well…”, I said, and she turned around and screamed, leapt towards me and continued screaming while I sang-laughed her name, “Manthe!” When I looked up from our jazzy hug, we had a small audience of admirers, one of whom asked in a thick New York accent “whaaat aaarre you two, faaashion mawdels or somethin?”. “No”, I said, “we are just South Africans!”

This song-and-dance was repeated when I entered the building and walked into a room lined with brightly coloured clothes on rails from which emerged Mashaba in a beautiful black voluminous Xibelani-inspired dress and a black Fure Midi bucket bag, both from Ham Ethop. The room lit up again as the street had moments ago. Before I could sit down, she asked, “Are you ready to go?” “Where to?” I wondered.

She needed to go to the garment district to find fabric for her Olenna Tyrell-like headpieces for this new collection, which was a mix of pastel coloured drop waist woollen dresses, grungy xibelani skirts and jackets and a 4pm Tea-Time palette of citruses including lemon, lime and orange floral brocade suits and shift dresses that were giving: leggy Tsonga gogo’s kist comes to life.

There we were in the garment district, catching up and turning heads when a swarm of other fabric shoppers gathered around us (mostly her) buzzing around our bags. A chorus of thank-yous later, we left the fabric store and rushed to meet the other designers at the Ralph Lauren headquarters. Inside the coffee shop of the flagship on 72nd and Madison, we experienced this unnamed phenomenon again when two store consultants rushed towards us to ask who we were and where we got our outfits. We walked (past the actress Carole Davis) outside to meet the other designers and suddenly we were a group of six women dressed head-to-toe in SA designer clothing walking down the street and actively changing the weather as a slow-motion storm of approving stares brewed around us. Some people couldn’t help themselves and demanded Instagram handles. Others took out their phones while children pointed.

The day before, Mashaba had been chased down at Saks 5th Avenue by a stylist who turned out to be a Vogue contributor running after another of her bags. I say none of this to boast. It’s just something I’ve noticed and have since been trying to understand. These clothes don’t cost too much, are made from beautiful but not particularly unique fabrics, but there’s a spirit in the garments, the styling and the wearers that change the air around them. What does our style have to do with where we come from and how does where we come from influence the way we look?

“Hi, I’m Keneilwe”, said one of the most Southern African faces I have ever seen. She wore an earthy brown denim-thick cotton jacket with a matching corset top over the jacket, parent jeans, brown leather loafers and a thick single braid that reached all the way down her ankles. Immediate respect. On the subway back home, I would scroll through her Instagram and feel terrible for never having heard of Neimil, her ready-to-wear label.

Designer number two wore black-framed glasses around her small angular Xhosa face, a black anorak jacket and matching trousers, white sneakers and a black bucket hat or ispoti. Her name was written on her top in crisp white letters: GUGU.

Designer number three was tall, wispy in her gait with a pair of intelligent eyes behind rimless glasses and a light pewter turban to match her pewter shirt dress and bright blue nails. She would extend an elegant arm to introduce herself as Thando, though the others called her Munkus, the name of her label and the affectionate name her family called her.

On show day, I spent five hours with them as they prepared for their shows later that evening at the Chelsea Factory, which was once Annie Leibowitz’ photography studio and loft. While they steamed and pressed, fitted, styled and photographed their looks, what was immediately noticeable when I watched Ribane, Mashaba, Gugu Peteni, Keneilwe Mothoa and Thando Ntuli was the connection between them, a palpable camaraderie, ubuntu and a confident knowing that they are cut from the same sacred cloth. They thrived in their togetherness while quietly occupying their very different individual approaches to fashion.

While I was officially there to interview them for this story, I got swept into the meaning of this moment and like Jaguar’s Irene Kakooza — the very hands-on and deeply committed brains behind their selection for this show — I too ended up carrying garment bags, lifting rails, advising on looks and dressing models, which took me back to my very first job as a 20 year-old at Cosmopolitan.

The details of the collections almost don’t matter, not out of disrespect for the irrefutable craftsmanship, but because collectively, they tell a story about a place and a people, a moment in which a different generation of SA designers are sharpening the sounds of their own voices. The full-house audience was stunned. None of these designers are doing this purely as a career;  it feels like they have a calling to tell stories through clothing, to imbue their work with the meaning of their lineage and their own creative freedom, to understand the industrial process but not to be consumed by it, to keep the value of the hands and their unique cultural imprint alive because it gives life, not only to the wearers but, to those who encounter them.

I don’t think our history can ever be fully severed from the way we view the world. We come from a place where the earnestness of the struggle to remain human in the ugly tentacles of apartheid continues to be the force behind the collective nature of our contemporary art. From the stubborn cheekiness of Amapiano against the melting promises of democracy, to how clothing carries the spirit of a beauty that human beings can’t help but necessitate, both inside and outside struggle. Culturally speaking, we may no longer be wearing xibelanis and imibhaco every day, but the entities that have always clothed our people are as alive now in these and other designers, and all you have to do is walk down the busy streets of New York and watch people witnessing this.

Milisuthando Bongela-Davis is a New York City-based SA writer and filmmaker.