One night at the Virgin Mobile Cape Town Fashion Week

15 Aug 2008

If only SA corporates and indeed our Olympians could be more like fashion; representing a merger of usually one person's vision with passion, team work and unstinting attention to detail, in the name of making something beautiful.

Elle editor, Jackie Burger

Attending the second day of the Virgin Mobile Cape Town Fashion Week, 14 August 2008, I had a quick word with with Elle fashion editor, Jackie Burger, gracing the sumptuous velvet furniture in the press lounge, commenting how, in my opinion, Elle fashion stories are the best out of all the South African magazines. Thanking me humbly, she revealed how hard it is to find a unique angle, but that she has a great team (there's that word again). She also attributed all success to Chris Viljoen and then added interestingly, "but we fight a lot."

Condom-clad Virgin Mobile promo girl

Isn't it wonderful, I said, that people have enough energy and passion, that they care enough about the end result of what they do - heck, that they trust each other enough - to fight for perfection.

Anyway, apart from the condom-clad Virgin Mobile girls - now there's brand that continuously leads us up the learning curve - it is the clothes, the models and the designers that everyone comes to see.

I had the privilege of catching the Rosenworth show, with lots of nice comprehensible day wear in assorted sorbet colours, flowing over fabrics like watercolour.

Gavin Rajah collection

Also much of a show with props and what have you, from Gavin Rajah, showing a mostly safe, tasteful, muted pallette and the consummate tailoring for which he has garnered an apparently global reputation. His signature, paying tribute to his team of gifted seamsters, bringing them all down the ramp for their well deserved moment in the limelight.

Hip Hop talent

Cheryl Arthur of Hip Hop has become somewhat of a darling of the Cape Town Fashion week, with her sassy, romantic rose-themed clothing delivering on all the expectations of a party girl in Africa.

Overview for summer 2008/9 - you can't go wrong with anything that you can flounce in, with subtle a homage to the 1950, when men were men and women wore their stilettoes to do the washing up.

View the full gallery of photos here.