Too many fashion week balls in air

To the average South African it's all a bit of a muddle: another day, another fashion show. Another city, another fashion week.

By the end of September, seven fashion weeks will have taken place in South Africa.

It's getting confusing for the media and the buyers, too.

Simply stated, no one has the time to attend all these fashion weeks and, inevitably, a remarkable talent is going to slip through the cracks because of this.

It's time for us to simplify and organise the fashion week activity around the country.

For the sake of every designer who invests time, emotion, energy and a whole lot of money into these collections, we should be taking stock and finding a more workable solution to the fashion week conundrum.

Let's find the most appropriate way of bottling all this enthusiasm around our fledgling fashion industry and direct it towards achieving everyone's ultimate aim — creating a commercially viable designer fashion industry in this country.

It's easy to understand why everyone's trying to grab a bit of fashion week action for themselves: The existing fashion weeks have, in recent years, succeeded in setting up some remarkable developmental projects that could make a great difference to the lives of those involved.

At Sanlam SA Fashion Week, the Fashion Fusion project has for years teamed rural crafters with established designers, to great effect.

At Arise Cape Town Fashion Week, Foschini has stepped in to sponsor the work by the Cape Town Fashion Council to identify emerging design talent in the city.

And with Arise Africa Fashion Week, African Fashion International has brought together the best of African fashion on a stage that will tour the continent after next year's Soccer World Cup show.

What a platform for designers who might previously only have had a following in their own countries. No region should be denied the right to find, nurture and then showcase the design talent on their doorstep.

But I fear that we are confusing the concept of a fashion week with that of a fashion festival — and that the point of a fashion week still eludes many.

The fashion week is supposed to be when a country's leading designers reveal their summer and winter collections to the gathered audience of media and retail representatives — a season in advance.

Armed with information about the following year's trends and which styles to buy and style, these folk return to their desks and the great big fashion wheel starts turning.

Could the solution be to launch something like the Currie Cup of fashion showcases?

With so much regional activity on the fashion front, let's have a national fashion council vetting provincial fashion festivals with the help of regional media and retail representatives.

Then send the top contenders — the ones with the real capacity and potential to take their place in the commercial fashion world — to two national fashion weeks where they get to interact with the buyers and the fashion media.

It seems like a more workable situation that surely gives our designers the best shot at building their businesses.

Let's keep the developmental programmes going. In fact, do more. Find that talent hiding in Hazyview and East London and groom it for the big time.

But bring a culture of excellence to the catwalk and let only those who can make it in the business of fashion be allowed to show at Fashion Week SA.

Source: The Times

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