A collection for the new normal

When the presidency began the four-day countdown to lockdown, clothing brand Viviers was able to respond with a plan that readied it to sell winter essentials under level four.

Viviers is a high-end clothing brand with a sustainable “circular design” practice, using “fabrics from warehouses that have been sitting with dead-stock from the ’70s”.

In a website write-up, founder Lezanne Viviers recalled the seven weeks it took for her team to create the winter essentials capsule collection remotely.

Viviers employs in-house tailors who have their own sewing machines. So, by the time the lockdown was in place, Viviers’s team could be been sent home with the “cotton bindings, zips, trimming, hardware [and] labels, along with the precut garments and detailed drawings” that they needed to actualise the collection from their homes.

When the lockdown reached level four, Viviers applied for the essential-services permit that allowed it to slowly reopen its studio, make masks and complete its winter essentials capsule collection. Two weeks later, the studio is open, stocked with its new collection and accepting appointment-only visits.

Planning ahead was the brand’s saving grace, but the write-up acknowledges that lockdown demands that cultural practitioners “adapt and morph into multidisciplinary and multitasking creatives”.

When the collection was ready to be advertised, the show that Viviers had envisioned “quickly had to be reinvented into a presentation that was created in isolation”.

Viviers and creative director Sithasolwazi Kentane conceptualised, styled, photographed, modelled and edited the collection’s lookbook, and debuted it on the brand’s social-media accounts. — Zaza Hlalethwa