Fashion: A new identity
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9 were called South Sudan, there is a great change,” said Davidica Ikai, chairwoman of the Itwak Women’s Group, one of the groups displaying and selling wares at the festival.
Mer Ayang, a singer who performed at the event, said she hoped the development in the capital would not come at the expense of the rest of the country. “I would judge my country in terms of development on better schools, hospitals, streets and public services,” she said.
Eva Logune, a South Sudanese model based in Malaysia, said the fashion and arts event was a chance to showcase another side of the country for a change.
“Even five years ago, all you could hear about Juba or South Sudan was people are starving, people are dying,” said Ms. Logune, who models under the name Eva Lopa. “This shows we’re not all about violence.”
Decades of civil war created millions of internally displaced people and refugees, many living in neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia, or in South Africa, the United States and Canada.
Ms. Garang was born in Juba and moved as a child to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, after her father died. When she was 18, she and her mother moved to Cairo, where at first she had to work as a cleaner. Because she spoke English well, she was able to find a better job as a receptionist, but she still remembers the casual racism that confronted her while riding the bus in Egypt.
She moved again, to Britain, eventually earning a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She returned to what was then southern Sudan just before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that charted the course for independence was signed in January 2005.
Through her work with the United Nations and nonprofit groups, Ms. Garang traveled the country, collecting so many artifacts she turned her home into a mini-gallery. She combined her hobby of collecting with her interest in fashion to organize the first fashion show last year, which she paid for.
This year’s clothes, all locally designed except for a line by an Ethiopian, blended traditional African fabrics with more modern cuts. The models had not developed the cool nonchalance of their counterparts in Paris or Milan yet, and were dancing behind the curtain to Nicki Minaj’s song “Starships” as they waited to go on.
A female model with a shaved head and an extra-bouncy strut consistently got the loudest applause. The loudest, that is, until Ms. Garang’s male model appeared, his broad shoulders and chest bare, and his waist hugged only by bright orange, yellow and blue beads, to gaping stares from the men and whooping cheers from the women.
“It’s something I feel I have to do,” Ms. Garang said. “So far, it looks like people enjoy it.”