Catwalks ready for Fashion Week
Tammy O'Reilly
21 July 2005
South African Fashion Week has become the country's premier fashion events - so prestigious, in fact, that no one questions that it doesn't actually run for a week.
Now running for four days, the event has become the platform from which emerging designers show their collections. Established designers are also able to reinvent their styles and share trade secrets with amateurs.
Fashion week kicks off on Thursday, 28 July and runs until 31 July at the Sandton Convention Centre and other off-site venues around Johannesburg, such as the Old Synagogue in the inner city.
Once again it boasts an impressive line up of more than 26 shows, including acclaimed collections from local designers like Amanda Laird Cherry, Black Coffee and Clive Rundle.
Popular Johannesburg label Stoned Cherry has promised that its collection this year will signal a return to brand purity, sidestepping the commercialism that has grown around it in the past few
years.
Fashionistas will also be on the look out for the emerging designers the organisers consider to be the fresh fashion talent of the future, like Rubicon, Steph G and Ma Cherry.
A pilot addition to this year's week is a double cultural show featuring African and Indian designs on one ramp. Named Couture Collective, this show will present African talent like Aaron Sepeng and Jeffrey Mmokele, and local designers who have collaborated with Indian designers Tarun Tahiliaini and Rohit Bal.
Besides the shows, there will be more than 100 exhibition stands and the annual Arts and Culture Fashion Seminar. Garments from selected designers will be on sale in the expo arena, along with a variety of other lifestyle and fashion-related products.
Collections from students from various tertiary institutions around the country will be shown on the public catwalks in the expo arena.
Source: City of Johannesburg
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