In the cavernously grand Raphael Room, Magugu\u2019s 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\u2019s long-running free public-access Fashion in Motion series.<\/p>\n
And with that, the young guest from Johannesburg found himself heralding part two of London Fashion Week. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s must-see \u201cAfrica Fashion\u201d exhibition, whose narrative showcases the explosion and variety of young fashion talent from countries all over the continent.<\/p>\n
The appeal of Magugu\u2019s brand is tuned into the life-affirming, upbeat international frequency of fashion\u2014lots of pinks and vibrant reds for spring, classily sexy cutaway ribbed knit dresses, caped tracksuits. But there are deeper dimensions to Magugu\u2019s work than immediately hits the eye, as everyone realizes who\u2019s 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\u2019s name: Discard Theory.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIn fashion school, we learned about Thorstein Veblen\u2019s essay on conspicuous consumption,\u201d Magugu reflected. \u201cAnd how being extravagantly wasteful was part of showing off wealth and status. Here you see it all\u2014all 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dunusa, he explains, \u201ctranslates as \u2018Bend Over,\u2019 because that\u2019s what everyone does to rummage.\u201d We watch him retrieving handfuls of men\u2019s 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. \u201cWhat I wanted was to invert Veblen\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cAfricans 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,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut two things can be true at once,\u201d he cautions. \u201cThis sort of second-hand thing has devastating effects on the continent environmentally. Some people go off and patchwork garments together. They\u2019re creating these thrift shops. A lot of my friends have started entire businesses that way. I also look at it, how it\u2019s impacted our sense of national identity. It\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
In fact, Magugu\u2019s elevation of elements and signifiers of South African style\u2014like the \u201cfish and chips\u201d print (inspired by street food stalls), the photoshopped texture of mohair blankets, and his caped-back bright red track suit\u2014aren\u2019t made of materials from the market. In order to survive as a business\u2014and to operate Thebe Magugu as a label that sells globally\u2014the designer has struggled with problems that have made him rethink his sourcing. \u201cNo one is talking about South Africa\u2019s extreme energy crisis. There are power cuts for up to six hours. Every day, there\u2019s no electricity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fashion system\u2019s expectations on him as a rising star, one who is visible seasonally on his visits to Europe, has also been too hard. \u201cYou almost begin to want to follow a template that wasn\u2019t really built for you. I think that\u2019s the really overarching realization. It doesn\u2019t make it fun, so you have to find your own way of doing things, so I\u2019m strategizing something that balances my commerce and business side with something that\u2019s just less cruel to myself.\u201d He\u2019s 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\u2019s Nona Source deadstock supply platform. Already, buyers have noticed the improvement in quality\u2014they bought his collection in Paris.<\/p>\n
Probably, he\u2019ll 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\u2019s video comes out loud and clear: \u201cI love how we always recontextualize pain, and almost turn it on its head,\u201d he says. \u201cI think that\u2019s the case, when you\u2019re taking something that\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thebe Magugu put on his first-ever women\u2019s runway show in London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum last Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12963,"featured_media":20032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36],"tags":[7,37,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-20035","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fashion","8":"category-lifestyle","9":"tag-apie-project","10":"tag-fashion","11":"tag-lifestyle"},"yoast_head":"\n