WHY CAPE TOWN FASHION WEEK IS IMPORTANT!

The first quarter of every year sees global fashion audiences converge in the Mother City for a celebration of African fashion. Designers, models, celebrities, and everyday fashion enthusiasts flock together to take in all that Cape Town Fashion Week presented by African Fashion International, has to offer. For one week, the city is abuzz with designer shows, parties, industry talks and networking events. It becomes the fashion capital it has always held promise to be.

This year, African Fashion International (AFI) is organizing a Cape Town Fashion Week 2023 with an entirely novel concept. Combining fashion shows, retail opportunities, art, design, and tech, it will offer a distinct experience that will enable attendees to interact with fashion beyond just watching the catwalk. The event also aims to encourage Africans to embrace clothing designed by home-grown talent.

There’s a sense that our industry is still playing catch-up. In the afterglow of successful fashion weeks, a key question remains unanswered. After ages of relentless yet largely undervalued creative pioneering, will this be the season that sees African fashion finally get its much-delayed flowers from both Africans and the world?

In a Vogue Italia interview with Leanne Tlhagoane, designer duo MmusoMaxwell noted the need for a business model that favours young African fashion designers. This observation, made in 2017, remains in perfect alignment with one made by fashion writer, Olya Kuryshchuk. During a Copenhagen Fashion Week panel discussion about the importance of incubating emerging talent, Kuryshchuk observed that the industry tends to tokenise designers for their talents, directing little investment towards the skills and foundation that would grant them longevity. Furthermore, the ecosystem of fashion media and supply chain that upholds these individuals is also significantly impacted. It creates a system of “every man for himself… and his homies. Plus, maybe one ‘cool’-enough girl”, she noted.

It is not surprising, then, that parents, peers, and aspiring designers themselves remain sceptical of fashion as a viable profession. The height of systemic barriers inspires little faith. Enter AFI as an aggregator platform.

Recognising the endless amount of work to be done, AFI take matters into its own hands each year through Cape Town and Joburg Fashion Weeks, utilising the country’s fashion capitals as a stage for established and emerging talents, providing emerging designers with a sponsorship, mentorship, and a marketing platform to showcase their work while cultivating profitable and sustainable businesses.

By virtue of the continent’s complex histories, what sets any African fashion week apart socially, culturally, and economically from those of its global counterparts is the reality that it needs different things – a different kind of investment that considers the particular needs of emerging African designers. African fashion industries tackle a dual-headed monster. While building and connecting a universe of mesmerising creativity, exceptional craftsmanship and luxury, they are charged with the work of reinspiring cultural and economic reinvestment in our continent, undercutting systemic barriers and creating mobility where there is little.

Cape Town Fashion Week has long been an indispensable vehicle for African fashion. For 15 years, African Fashion International – the owners of Cape Town Fashion Week – have anchored their efforts on breaking the aforementioned barriers and bridging cultural and economic gaps. AFI’s fashion weeks have offered emerging designers opportunities to build upon and share their skills and craftsmanship.

This crucial value exchange makes for a unique investment in the industry, strengthening emerging designers and actively fashioning the inheritance that is so key to the concept of heritage. It showcases the continent’s distinct approaches to style, as told through the work of renowned African fashion designers while also providing a platform for up-and-coming names. In bringing the old and the new to the same stage, and facilitating this meeting between North, South, East and West Africa in fashion, Cape Town Fashion Week treats Africa’s unique fashion industries as an ecosystem that must remain united, enriched and conserved.

Moreover, events such as Cape Town Fashion Week 2023 present an opportunity to cultivate a distinct fashion heritage, of which African peoples across the board are keen to take ownership. Setting our major cities up as nexuses of the continent’s cultural richness and diverse approaches to style, it enables us to defy history by curating our own visibility on the global stage.

One thing that has continued to transcend history and connect Africans is a penchant for sharing ourselves with the world through storytelling. Cape Town Fashion Week is distinguished by its desire to drive a range of narratives from every corner of the continent, nurturing talent where the world does not think to look.

Applying this sense of storytelling to the world of fashion takes the conversation beyond whether or not African brands are competitive or can endure on a global scale, into an examination of how they contribute to ongoing global fashion conversations. How their offering drives a more progressive, home-grown narrative of African fashion that decentralises Western perceptions of it.

On the economic and cultural reclamation of African fashions in the catalogue for the V&A Museum’s landmark exhibition, “Africa Fashion”, Sunny Dolat and Dr Njoki Ngumi of the Nest Collective write:

“It’s important that whatever paths and trajectories Black and African designers want to embark on are open to them. It is important that our local definitions of success are as broad and diverse as the place we call home, and that they honour the spectrum of designers, creative directors, tailors, made-to-order business, artisans, and makers who contribute to this mega industry.”

In a conversation about the significance of fashion week in an African context, this is perhaps the most apt conclusion. Fashion week is our moment of cultural and economic reclamation, in which the possibilities of African fashion industries materialize in unison. Revitalizing the image of fashion in Africa as a professional and entrepreneurial venture, Cape Town Fashion Week presents itself as a chance to introduce business and conversational models that are genuinely beneficial to African designers.

One would hope that this moment when all eyes are on us is in fact more than just a moment, and that fashion industries all over the African continent begin to experience such keen investment, locally and globally that we begin to shift perspectives on fashion’s professional viability. Cape Town Fashion Week continues to serve as an impetus for progress, and for reminding the world in our own words, of the brilliance of African fashion.?

Cape Town Fashion Week 2023 will be hosted at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from March 22-25, 2023. Click below for more information about the event, including show schedules, programme of events and tickets.