ORIGIN STORIES
For these three emerging designers, finding their place in the fashion world was not about becoming, but who they already were. By Alice Birrell.
For these three emerging designers, finding their place in the fashion world was not about becoming, but who they already were.
THE ADAGE OF scribes – ‘write what you know’ – didn’t have the same mass application in fashion for a long time. In its pursuit of the urbane, smatterings of esoteric references from centuries long gone and cultures long lost became the studied pursuit of the creative director. Now a new guard of designers is flipping the system. These three emerging talents look to their own stories, interrogating personal histories and re-proposing traditional dress, leading it away from a stasis bound by tradition and into new territory with an enlivened modern design vocabulary. With it, they’re teaching a lesson: that the most genuine creative expression comes from within.
THEBE MAGUGU
‘The Big Hole’ is a former 19th -century diamond mine in Kimberley, central South Africa, that sits incongruously on designer Thebe Magugu’s website, until you realise that his personal story – he hails from the ‘Diamond City’ – is woven into his womenswear. It’s part of the 2019 LVMH prize winner’s central organising tenet. “I look to designers who approach design in a very auto-biographical way, expressing their inner-most thoughts,” he says. Part of Matchesfashion.com The Innovators Programme, Magugu studied fashion history, design, photography and media in Johannesburg where he now lives and works, to communicate his culture through different mediums. Get to know him, the two tribes from which he hails, and the way his mother, aunts and grandmother live – going to church, working demanding jobs, socialising – he says, and you get to know his clothes. “You understand why I love pleats – because of our local church next door. Why I love bold prints – because everyone has an almost blatant disregard for sensible matching. You understand the slight irreverence in some of the clothes – because you can see my family and friends’ sense of humour.” It’s important in fashion, he says, because “as the world rushes towards what’s next and what’s new, things that once were, are often forgotten – which is an ironic shame because without those histories, those futures would have nothing to stand on the shoulders of.”
LESLEY MOBO
Filipino designer Lesley Mobo has worked in Paris and London, and studied under the tutelage of Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins, but it was the global pandemic that saw him return home to Aklan, Philippines, and hit on a potent creative streak. “Using every hour and second the lockdown gave me to reflect on my own heritage, local art and history, I created a collection.” It is based on the national women’s dress, a terno, a formal dress with butterfly sleeves, but in printed cottons in piercing brights with couture-like folds and billows. It’s an act that he thinks of as pure creation and discovery. “Designing with my heritage and culture attached has been like being re-born again.” The way he describes his aesthetic? Well, it’s truly global: “It’s like Mildred Pierce meets Grey Gardens via the warm waters of the Philippine Sea and the Pacific Ocean!”
JENIA KIM
The family history of designer Jenia Kim, of label J.Kim, doesn’t follow an archetype – and neither do her clothes. Instead she uses her refined pieces to parse the triptych of place that defines her: she was raised in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, before emigrating to Moscow with her parents. Part of the Koryosaram (Korean nationals living in the former Soviet Union), all three cultures filter into her work. Tashkent’s “dusty yards and endless feasts” with her family formed her visual language, while Moscow was where she learnt couture techniques under Russian designer Vyacheslav Zaitsev, and “to be different, and not afraid to be so”. Her Korean roots are present in traditional dress, or hanbok, a visual through-line in her work. She transplants that concise, elegant feel into her collections, and the codified meaning in clothing: for example, a circle jacquard silk used with a traditional hanbok fabric reflects a polka dot dress her mother once had. While this is her own story, she takes extra steps to imbue authenticity into her work. When making a collection inspired by Korean women divers: “I travelled to Jeju Island in South Korea to meet the ladies, dive with them, visit their homes.” She pushes for that transfer of culture, which aids in finding connection. “The message is we are all unique, and our origin helps to better understand ourselves,” she says. “It is wonderful to be a bright, united energy, but with different stories, thoughts, tastes, ideas.”