In SA: Local Upcoming Designers Suffer The Arrival of International Brands

Global fashion chain H&M recently opened in Cape Town and will launch in Johannesburg next month. Along with many of the other global chains that populate our malls and offer international trends at affordable prices, we have to wonder: should local designers consider throwing in the towel?

With SA Fashion Week Autumn/ Winter 2016 on the go this week, we asked some of the local industry personalities if home-grown fashion is in danger of becoming obsolete.

Lucilla Booyzen, SA Fashion Week director, believes the event plays a big role in creating a business platform for local designers.

”This is where the designers show their next season’s collections to the media, buyers, top clients and celebrities,” she says.

The growth of international brands launching store after store in South Africa - from Zara to Top Shop, River Island and Woolworths (full of Australian brands) - has made our cities like every other big city in the world - part of a global mall for international brands standardising urban streets.

But Booyzen says local designers don’t have to compete with international brands .

“They must create collections that their consumers desire and want to have in their wardrobes.

“The designers are not in competition with the brands you are referring to. This is why developing the Creative Fashion Design Industry, to represent the designers, is so important in South Africa.”

Booyzen says only South African department stores and manufacturers are affected by the Zaras and Topshops of the world, and that South Africa should become a designer-led industry and resist following international trends.

Rich Mnisi, now running his own label, OATH, thinks designers are misguided by fashion schools.

“The way we’re taught is incorrect,” he says. “We learn more about international retail while the idiosyncrasies of our localMARKET are ignored.”

Mnisi launched his brand at AFI and was one of four AFI Fastrack winners at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Joburg. He was also awarded the AFI Fastrack young designer of the year at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Africa.

He says that although AFI opened the doors of the industry for him, and gave him the opportunity to exhibit OATH in Paris, local designers are not even encouraged to use African prints.

The designer, known for his modern, edgy sport-luxe garments, believes there is a huge disadvantage to showing at fashion weeks.

“There are too many organisations running fashion platforms, which makes it difficult for us stand out internationally.

“It would benefit designers if all the organisations came together and put on one show.”

Mnisi says young designers have suffered most with the arrival of international brands.

“These brands come to South Africa after the internet has made the public aware of them.” Big brands have huge advertising budgets behind them, and most of their clothes are mass manufactured in factories that service numerous labels. How can independent designers compete?

“Established designers like David Tlale, Thula Sindi, Clive Rundle and Marianne Fassler have historical client bases that they built up before the advent of the internet and its mass-marketing machine,” says Mnisi.

“It’s hard to place yourself in this industry. While you’re studying the market a new international brand is launched, backed by rich corporates, and you have to start from scratch.”

Wanted magazine’s contributing fashion editor and stylist, Jenny Andrew, believes the biggest challenge facing local designers is the lack of support from the textile industry.

Andrew, who’s been in the fashion industry for more than 30 years, says fashion weeks are necessary: “Fashion weeks have an important role to play in that designers are given a chance to create a collection that’s different from that of ready-to-wear collections you find in chain stores.

“But the most important part about fashion weeks is the buyers. Buyers from all over the country come to choose clothes off the ramp to take to their clients and shops in other parts of the country.”

Andrew says that even with international retail stores popping up all over the country, there are still people who prefer to wear local designs because they don’t want to look like everyone else.

”That’s the gap local designers should fill,” she says.

Whether there are enough of those people to sustain the industry remains to be seen.