The South African Fashion Designers To Watch

“Collaborating with artisans and working to innovate is something that’s always been a part of the studio,” says designer Lezanne Viviers of Viviers Studio. The designer is an art school graduate (she majored in sculpture with a degree in fashion) and works by artists and artisans such as Marlene Steyn, Stephanie Bentum and Pretoria Weavers Guild often form the fabric of a collection.

Speaking of 2023’s Confections x Collections event – an annual five-day celebration of fashion with salon-style shows hosted at the Mount Nelson, A Belmond Hotel in Cape Town – Viviers says: “We realised that we are, almost by default, putting together a slow fashion system that could be an example to the rest of the world. We work slower because of limitations such as load shedding and resources. This also makes you more creative, reinventing the fabric 10 different times with less wastage.”

“In Johannesburg especially, we’re emerging from the cracks in the pavement in a grey place and blooming such colour, such joy,” says Wanda Lephoto, who founded his eponymous label in 2016. “But we’re also creating meaningful conversations that change our lives as South Africans – fundamentally, it’s all about people.”

His collections, which use reappropriated patterns, knits, uniform-like tailored suits, and soft appliqué details, are centered around themes of identity, co-existence, and representation. Each collection is accompanied by nostalgic campaign images featuring characters that are so visible they largely go unnoticed, including the asylum seeker, the student applying for an ID, the churchgoer, and the ubiquitous checked nylon Ghana Must Go bag, synonymous with travelers and migrants.

From accountant to fashion blogger to winner of the AFI Fastrack Young Designer 2021, Shamyra Moodley’s metamorphosis is as head-turning as her ambitiously upcycled skirts and gowns. Each of the vivid designs for her Laani Raani label is carefully cut, trimmed, and stitched from pieces of donated vintage fabric, saris, embroidery, scraps, and reclaimed T-shirt yarn into elegant creations that tell a narrative through the lens of her African, Indian, and Irish heritage.

Circularity is always at the forefront of what she does: “I’m renovating my garage to make it one of the most sustainable studios in the world. Any water that I use – because I work with very old, damaged remnant fabric and we consume a lot when we dye or wash fabric – is harvested from JoJo [rainwater harvesting] tanks, and all my machines run off power from solar panels.”

Cape Town-based Chu Suwannapha was working as an editor and stylist at local fashion magazines when he launched his own label in 2015. He quickly earned the nickname “the prince of prints” for his joyful, eye-popping collections, cutting traditional African fabrics in silhouettes that nodded to his Thai heritage.

In 2023, he presented his latest collection at Pitti Uomo in Florence, a whimsical story of pirates and ocean-faring entitled Sea Explorer. It’s somewhat softer than his boldly layered looks in the past, while still masterfully mixing print and texture. Almost autobiographical in its fluid blend of cultures, Suwannapha’s work always has a feeling of movement and a questioning of identity – a sense of finding oneself as a global citizen through fashion.

In 2020, while the world was shut down, Sindiso Khumalo was having a breakout year, scooping up the Green Carpet Fashion Award for Best Independent Designer as well as the prestigious LVMH Prize. While the attention on her brand is now global (last year, Khumalo created a colorful, retro-tinged collection for & Other Stories), the narrative she weaves is still resolutely local and female-focused.

The recycled cotton smocks and playsets, inspired by vintage portraits of women from Africa and the African diaspora, have become her signature. “I think my dresses have defined the brand. We are unapologetically feminine and love celebrating women in all our collections,” she says.

When Lukhanyo Mdingi launched his namesake brand in 2015, his aim was to showcase local South African artisans. Today, he works with craft communities from Cape Town to Burkina Faso, creating contemporary shapes in an array of fabrics and textures – from striped wool and silk polo sweaters to colorful tailoring.

It scored him recognition by the LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize in 2021 and the Amiri Prize in 2023. This year, Mdingi plans to launch an online store as well as continue to use design to inform social change. “Each collection has its particular point of view,” he says. “But what I’ve come to realize is that a hybrid of artisanal craft and refinement stitches it all together – I think that has a lot to do with the textile communities we work with within Burkina Faso and southern Africa, specifically in Khayelitsha here in Cape Town.”