In the cavernously grand Raphael Room, Magugu’s audience watched avidly as models wearing his bright, neat trouser suits, happy-looking graphic prints, and dippily-swishing knife-pleated skirts emerged from a giant pink checkered laundry bag installation at the end of the gallery. His appearance at the V&A was part of the museum’s long-running free public-access Fashion in Motion series.
And with that, the young guest from Johannesburg found himself heralding part two of London Fashion Week. It’s now running concurrently with the influx of art events and high net-worth audiences inundating the city around the Frieze fair in Regents Park (part-planned, like Alexander McQueen, and part-rescheduled because of the Queen’s death, like Roksanda and Raf Simons). But the timing was happenstance for Magugu: a live event for excited visitors to take in alongside the museum’s must-see “Africa Fashion” exhibition, whose narrative showcases the explosion and variety of young fashion talent from countries all over the continent.
The appeal of Magugu’s brand is tuned into the life-affirming, upbeat international frequency of fashion—lots of pinks and vibrant reds for spring, classily sexy cutaway ribbed knit dresses, caped tracksuits. But there are deeper dimensions to Magugu’s work than immediately hits the eye, as everyone realizes who’s followed his Paris presentations, and watched his absorbing videos about his Johannesburg family, friends, and culture. So, too, this time. The clue was in the collection’s name: Discard Theory.
Magugu made it explicit in a documentary video, which follows him making a dawn visit to Dunusa market in downtown Johannesburg, one of the mountainous textile markets that are dumping grounds for American and European clothing waste all over Africa. “In fashion school, we learned about Thorstein Veblen’s essay on conspicuous consumption,” Magugu reflected. “And how being extravagantly wasteful was part of showing off wealth and status. Here you see it all—all the brands sprawled out on the floor. It got me thinking that places like Dunusa market almost act as a sort of nexus between local and global. It’s like the melting pot, where all these sorts of things come and influence us, and maybe we influence them in some sort of way. A very interesting sort of a melting pot.”
Dunusa, he explains, “translates as ‘Bend Over,’ because that’s what everyone does to rummage.” We watch him retrieving handfuls of men’s ties (in some of the red-spectrum shades that ended up in the collection), salvaging cargos and jeans, and sports tops and track pants in the middle of the graying heaps and the frantic chaos of hagglers and traders. Then, back in his studio, he begins reworking the garments. “What I wanted was to invert Veblen’s theory, to turn it into a trickle-up theory. Taking from things that had been in bins in the market, and pushing it back up into a luxury space.”
The frenzied tussling in the market over the detritus from the global North speaks volumes about desperation, and deliberately makes confronting viewing for a fashion audience. Backstage, after the show, Magugu delved into the layers of intention behind exposing that. “Africans and South Africans have taken things that have sometimes hurt us in the past, and refurbished and recontextualized them to mean something else that can be reintegrated into our various cultures and heritage,” he explained. “But two things can be true at once,” he cautions. “This sort of second-hand thing has devastating effects on the continent environmentally. Some people go off and patchwork garments together. They’re creating these thrift shops. A lot of my friends have started entire businesses that way. I also look at it, how it’s impacted our sense of national identity. It’s not rare to see a woman in downtown Johannesburg wearing a traditional Shweshwe skirt, which is really important for certain traditional ceremonies, paired with a Vodafone shirt or a Manchester United T-shirt.”
In fact, Magugu’s elevation of elements and signifiers of South African style—like the “fish and chips” print (inspired by street food stalls), the photoshopped texture of mohair blankets, and his caped-back bright red track suit—aren’t made of materials from the market. In order to survive as a business—and to operate Thebe Magugu as a label that sells globally—the designer has struggled with problems that have made him rethink his sourcing. “No one is talking about South Africa’s extreme energy crisis. There are power cuts for up to six hours. Every day, there’s no electricity.”
The fashion system’s expectations on him as a rising star, one who is visible seasonally on his visits to Europe, has also been too hard. “You almost begin to want to follow a template that wasn’t really built for you. I think that’s the really overarching realization. It doesn’t make it fun, so you have to find your own way of doing things, so I’m strategizing something that balances my commerce and business side with something that’s just less cruel to myself.” He’s not about to give up in South Africa, but the knitwear and other pieces are now outsourced to Madagascar and Italy, using a good deal of fabric from LVMH’s Nona Source deadstock supply platform. Already, buyers have noticed the improvement in quality—they bought his collection in Paris.
Probably, he’ll be back there next season with a full-on show. London was just a happy detour for the season. But the African lesson of resilience from Magugu’s video comes out loud and clear: “I love how we always recontextualize pain, and almost turn it on its head,” he says. “I think that’s the case, when you’re taking something that’s essentially destroying us and our environment and where we live, but then we see how we can absorb it and make it work for us. And into something that makes us proud.”
