UNLIKE ANY OTHER

Words: Daniël Geldenhuys | Images: Instagram

It was a very non-fashion month fashion month. The traditional runway format was upended: few brands hosted shows with a physical audience, schedules blurred across fashion week borders and many a major name (Gucci, Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs, to name a few) sat this round out.

At the most anticipated show of the season, Prada’s new dawn under design duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, models marched through a room rigged with rotating camera-and-monitor structures set to record their every move. The collection was a considered calibration of two of fashion’s most influential and prolific design voices. A negotiation between creativity and practicality, it set the tone for what promises to be an era-defining alliance.

Designers who truly embraced their creative instincts created moments that will be remembered for their excellence well beyond their pandemic context. For Moschino, Jeremy Scott collaborated with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the studio responsible for The Muppets, to create a miniature fashion show. The resulting video is a riff on the traditional Haute Couture runway format, with marionette models walking for an elite edit of marionette guests including Anna Wintour and Edward Enninful. The show reportedly cost more than if it had been done on full-scale humans, partly thanks to the feat of craftsmanship it took to miniaturise the prints and fabrics used in the life-size collection.

For Loewe, Jonathan Anderson magnified his Show-in-a-Box concept, a tactile feast of printed matter he’d used to replace his first round of pandemic shows earlier this year. The Show-on-a-wall fit into (what this reviewer estimates as) an A1-size box no thicker than today’s average flatscreen television. The kit inside contains a pair of scissors, a brush, a roll of wallpaper designed by the artist Anthea Hamilton and life-size prints of every look in the collection. In a season defined by lookbooks, Zoom calls and fashion films, Anderson placed his guests “into the position they’re forced to be creative. They’re forced to interact.”

The digital aspect of fashion month set the stage for satellite creatives, an opportunity that allowed South African designers to illustrate their authentic stories with visuals far more dynamic than any runway setting. Rich Mnisi, alongside Nigerian designer Emmy Kasbit, showed his spring collection at the Vogue Italia Vogue Talents event on the Milan Fashion Week schedule. The Hiya Kaya collection celebrates VaTsonga women with a video spanning stunning landscapes in Limpopo and the Eastern and Western Cape.

A few days later on the Milan schedule was 2020 LVMH Prize finalist Sindiso Khumalo. Her collection title, Minty, is the childhood name of the 19th-century American activist Harriet Tubman who escaped slavery and made 13 missions to free an approximated 70 enslaved people in her lifetime. “We have to look at historical figures in order to understand our present,” writes Khumalo in her show notes. The collection video “tells the story of a young girl walking freely through the land. As women, we deserve to walk freely through any landscape without fear. We deserve to go to a post office, to be in our home or go to school without fear of rape, kidnapping and death.”

Thebe Magugu delivered Counter Intelligence on the Paris schedule. To say the collection’s accompanying short film was one of the best of the entire season, this season of all seasons, is really saying something. It’s a perfect entry point into Magugu’s Spring 2021 narrative on women spies in apartheid-era South Africa. “It always fascinated me how one can become a spy and commit high-treason,” explains the designer. An expert narrative application begins with the real-life voices of these women used to narrate the film, permeating all the way to Anne Marie Forsyth’s fingerprints that were scanned and scaled to create the polka-dot print on an asymmetric pleated skirt and maxi dress. The collection integrates its narrative references without a trace of gimmick, delivering new takes on wearable signatures such as the yellow-hue suit, the long-line parka and the statement shirt. Magugu is putting his 2019 LVMH Prize resources to good use, no question. He’s solid proof of one of the many values in investing in South African talent.