Designer Dale Strime shares the ins and outs of menswear, writes
Helen Herimbi
‘Music and fashion have always been my outlets.” Dale Strime, a drummer and street-wear designer, has turned his outlets into his businesses.
To date, this 30-something has established two bands and created or co-created several fashion brands.
With the likes of swede and CROWE, which he co-founded with Dean Pozniak, polarising the head-wear game and his own Streeks label that has been sported by celebrities like Siyabonga Ngwekazi, Braam hipsters and cool kids as far as Cape Town, Strime has a lot of experience in various aspects of street wear.
He said: “Growing up, we used to get told that fashion was a very feminine thing. Womenswear was the main thing and men had to buy at very high-end places, or shop in the mass-market stores like Edgars. It took a while to realise this could also be a man’s career.”
And now that he’s made a fully-fledged career out of it, he was happy to share some of his journey and a few tips on how to get on your own path. Because necessity is the mother of invention, inspiration to start your own brand can come from the most dire circumstances. Although Strime is the first to admit that he was lucky to be the middle child of parents who could afford to send him to London for a gap year, it wasn’t all rosy in the land of Harrods and Skepta.
“I needed to go out, see the world and decide things for myself. I wanted to live,” explains Strime. “It was the hardest but best time ever. We used to live off a beer a day, that was our protein. That’s when I started thinking of fashion as a legitimate career. In London, I worked at Topshop and realised this is something I could do.
“Whether from a retail front or as a designer. Over there, a lot of independent brands were doing well. I used to wear a lot of headgear. So me and my mates decided to start designing once-off trucker caps. Pharrell Williams and the N*E*R*D caps were massive and I always loved Pharrell. We thought it would be cool and we could make them back home (in South Africa). “So we’d get caps then draw designs on the caps with permanent cokey pens. That was very expensive. Then my friend, Guy, is a computer genius and we decided to design on computer, print it out and iron the designs on ourselves. We’d buy transfer paper from CNA and just iron it on.
“We had to find a name and the tube station that Guy lived at in London was called Seven Sisters, so we went with that name. That was like in
2003.” In London, Strime lived on Finchley Row. A while after he’d been back in Mzansi, he realised South African men didn’t have a variety of footwear to choose from. So he started an importing distribution company named Finchley Row, which distributed brands like Australia’s Urge.
“It did very well in the beginning,” says Strime. But after a while, what he was importing stopped being relevant to the local market.
So Strime “started designing some shoes under a licensing deal with Urge. I looked at a lot of trends while there and realised they didn’t have head wear.
“There was a gap in the market. We decided to design a cap with a short peak and made them out in a factory in Cape Town. That’s how swede and CROWE started. They came out so well. We were expecting to sell ten at the most but our first customer bought 150 straight from the start. We did really well. We were either going to sink or swim and luckily, we swam.” “What do you want to make and why do you want to make it?” Strime says these questions are good to ask yourself once you’ve lived a little and figured out what’s missing. “If you want to make something purely because it’s the cool thing to do, you won’t make it. Fashion is probably one of the hardest places to make money and the money you make might be tiny. All the big people have struggled for years to make it.
“Be honest about why you want to do what you want to do then have a solid vision. For instance: what is the brand? What is its story? Who do you want to supply to? A simple case study to test with is: if you could choose just one person anywhere in the world to wear your brand, who would it be? That’s a good way to see who you are and what you want.
“Then” Strime continues, “know what you want to be known for. Decide on one thing first. Make that and become known for it. Then once you have a loyal following, you can start adding the other aspects of your street-wear dreams. If you’re a T-shirt brand, make T-shirts. Then you can branch out into socks and jackets and anything else you want to do, once you’ve become well-known for the T-shirts.
“If you’re making T-shirts though, don’t abuse the consumers,” he cautions. “If you’re going to make T-shirts, don’t go and buy a random tee and then cut the label out. I made my own patterns, so that no one can copy me. Try your clothes out on you first. I didn’t have formal education of fashion, so I used to take swatches and feel it, rub it, smell it, touch it, wash it to see how it would shrink and stuff like that.”