Designing fashion into history

Wanda Lephoto’s ability to deep dive into “the piles” — the thrift shops in the Johannesburg inner city — and produce wonder is legend.  He has been excavating treasures and making new meaning from old rags ever since he can remember.

Following his mother into town from Berea, where he grew up, and watching her reclaim, reinvent and give value to clothes that had been discarded elsewhere, is key to understanding his life’s work.

It is a way of seeing. I would argue that it is also a radical act of reclaiming, and it has become the narrative thread that runs through the work of this artist, designer and thoughtful revisionist of history using a sartorial lens.

We meet for breakfast at Croft and Co, the wildly popular and super aesthetically pleasing cafe on Tyrone Avenue, Parkview, a few days after the opening of the exhibition at Museum Africa he has curated alongside Alison Moloney and Erica de Greef called Fashion Accounts. It is a reflection of their experience with the fashion archive of the museum.

A collection that runs to tens of thousands of pieces, and spans centuries, was donated to the museum by the Bernberg sisters, who run a small fashion museum on Jan Smuts Avenue. I wonder what it feels like to explore such an archive. “It is a complex feeling. As much as I appreciate the archive in its beauty, in the objects themselves, the other side of it is feeling the lack of representation, the lack of historical preservation of black South African lives, memories and passions that weren’t collected, that existed in the time.

“So there’s a sadness at the archive. If ordinary white South African lives were documented and preserved in the archive, why couldn’t ordinary black South African or even extraordinary black South African lives have been given the same chance to be preserved and looked at and cared for in the way that the colonial archive has?”

It is a question that has informed his practice ever since he dropped out of engineering at UCT to study fashion at Lisof. He formed a collective called The Sartists with Kabelo Kungwane, where they reimagined a sartorial past for their ancestors in various contexts, an imagined archive to fill in the enforced blanks of the past and to interrogate the clothes, and what they meant in relation to colonial power and how it informed representation.

“He (Kabelo) was studying journalism while I was studying fashion, and we would thrift together in the morning and in the darkroom every day. And because he was doing journalism and I was doing fashion, we felt like there was a thread of black history that was missing, and the story, the narrative that our grandparents and our parents used to tell us about the kind of ancestors we come from in the lineage.

“It felt like we had only been taught about struggle heroes, and there wasn’t any identity other than struggle heroes that black people belonged to. And very few sports heroes. So we started The Sartists as a way of reclaiming this lost history and archiving ourselves as a lost part of a lost history, so that we could start an archive for the next generation to have some kind of concept of the kind of history that was lost, that our parents didn’t have.

“So we reimagined ourselves telling stories to ourselves, because we couldn’t afford to pay models or use our parents. We used ourselves as a way of telling the stories and reimagine ourselves and find clothes, do research, going to the library, [doing] oral history, listening to stories.”

The work gained global traction and has been shown in museums all over the world from Brighton to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which commissioned a suit. Lest you think that fashion is ever superficial and skin deep, Wanda’s work excavates the politics of aesthetics and makes you pause before picking your next outfit. “For me the role of fashion is to reflect our time or reflect any time. It reflects certain identities, communities, people, and certain histories that might have existed or might not have existed or been excluded.

“For me, fashion fills in the gaps. It contextualises certain periods that people were going through, the human shared experience and the human lived experience — or our history, or the shared history that belongs to all of us. Fashion plays quite an important role in framing what that looks like, because fashion makes it easier to have these conversations, rather than having those conversations through politics or other means. Fashion brings a different perspective.”

This interview originally appeared in Sunday Times Lifestyle.