Making fashion history with
Thebe Magugu keeps making headlines. The source of his success is South Africa’s history and his own, writes
It isn’t unexpected for a fashion designer to be fixated with history, given they tend to raid archives looking for stylistic inspiration from bygone eras. Fashion is naturally self-referential. However, it is rare to encounter a designer who engages with the past with such social, political and conceptual intent and in such detail as Thebe Magugu.
The Kimberley-born Magugu doesn’t superficially plunder South African history, plucking out a style line or silhouette for a collection.
Instead, he undertakes in-depth research into an era, condition or events or relays a period he knows intimately, or such as a collection based on family photos from the 1980s. A textile print derived from the fingerprint of an apartheid-era spy is a good example of the granular details he considers.
This attention to detail is driven by the fact that while his clothing is desirable and trendy it is also political. Take his Doublethink menswear collection (Spring/summer 2022) which was intended to reflect the insidious nature of corruption.
In a text outlining the spirit driving the garments he honours whistleblowers and draws from a diverse mix of sartorial lexicons connected to male identity, from cowboys to township tsotsis, all read through George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel 1984, which digs into the nature of duplicity. His layered expression allows him to delve into the histories and cultures that inform the present.
“I’d never make it as an activist,” admits Magugu. “But I can do the work I do with fashion. I see fashion as a sort of documenting process. The things we want are passed down also from generation to generation.”
Magugu believes garments are relics, but also can function as veritable “texts” that are more “accessible ways of relaying information”.
This approach, combined with his obvious talent for reading and interpreting fashion trends through a South African historical filter, has seen him become not only one of the most important designers locally, and a conceptual one to boot, but an internationally recognised fashion star. He regularly shows his collections in Milan and Paris and almost anything he does is clocked by Vogue.
Yet he has remained in the country. He has consciously chosen to do so, he explains from his Joburg studio. “I just feel like I’m at my happiest when I can work from here. I go to Paris Fashion Week or whatever I need to do internationally and then come back. I think if I was to be in those spaces all the time, I would be disconnected from the things that actually power my work.”
South African history has indeed “powered” his work and propelled him to great heights.
This year has been a bumper year for the designer, with him regularly making headlines with various collections, collaborations and projects.
In May he launched The Heritage collection, a series of dresses boasting bold patterns inspired by South African cultures. Rendered in a
floaty silhouette which any woman could carry off with aplomb, Magugu appeared to be interested in democratising his fashion brand — making it accessible to all women, though of course what made the dresses a talking point was that in his imitable fashion, they were intended to celebrate and create awareness (among his international followers) of some of South Africa’s different cultures.
In an interview with the M&G at the launch, Magugu said he was tired of the stereotypical representations or ideas about African or South African cultures, which were so often reduced to associations with Nelson Mandela.
Ahead of Youth Day in June, Magugu made another political stand via his collaboration with local designer Wanda Lephoto with a T-shirt range titled “Everyday Resistance”.
The result was a hybrid motif, a combination of the two designers’ logos and imagery. The T-shirt was sold at R1 200, giving the youth access to their fashion, but also made the point that to transform our society young people need to collaborate.
Soon after he would play with stereotypical African motifs in a collection for the AZ Factory, a high-end fashion portal established by the late Moroccan-born designer Alber Elbaz, covering garments with naïve renditions of meerkats and colonising silky pajamas with “pouncing cheetah” prints.
The look that went viral from that collection was a two-piece blouse and skirt inspired by a 1997 Guy Laroche outfit designed by Elbaz. It included the novel trompe-l’oeil inkstained print blouse.
Then came his collaboration with Adidas, which saw him translate his idiosyncratic fashion brand into sportswear, resulting in a distinctly streetwear vibe, replete with a print featuring a black woman, thereby arguing for a more diverse sporting fraternity. The point was taken when athletes Dana Mathewson, Felix Auger Aliassime, Daria Kasatkina, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Jessica Pegula, Garbiñe Muguruza and Dominic Thiem were all seen sporting the look during the US open.
For some fashionistas it was Magugu’s sartorial engagement with Valentino’s creative director
Pierpaolo Piccioli — that saw the two designers swap their creations and rework them into their own style for Vogue magazine — that confirmed that Magugu had conquered the upper echelons of the fashion world.
This month Magugu’s “Midnight Angels” campaign was selected as one of the top stories for the 2022 edition of The Fashion Yearbook, an annual coffee table book that includes sections on covers, editorial, and advertising or brand campaigns, from around the world.
“There is a huge amount of excellent work to choose from. We have an international jury of fashion experts who vote on the best material,” observed Fiona Hayes, founder and jury member of that publication.
“Thebe Magugu is the first African designer to appear in The Fashion Yearbook. He is a brilliant designer who has had an amazing few months, and whose future is very bright.”
Naturally, Magugu says there is no one event in his sharp ascent to fashion fame that he cherishes most.
However, what has been “the most surreal” for him has been his relationship with Anna Wintour the international fashion world doyenne from Vogue magazine, who lends credibility to designers via her front row presence at shows.
When he thinks back to his 16-year-old-self, living in Kimberley feeling like the fashion worlds from TV and magazines existed in another stratosphere, he cherishes his situation.
“I would read Vogue a month behind, I was just fascinated by the Vogue brand and now I receive emails from Wintour asking me to be part of special projects.
“It is those moments that I feel I have come full circle,” says the now 28-year-old designer.
Magugu’s teen years in Kimberley were hard and he spent his time dreaming of life beyond that small town, beyond the township.
“I was extremely isolated, and very lonely in that small mining town. I felt very misunderstood,” he recalls.
Perhaps immersing himself in fashion spreads and TV provided an escape or made him feel more isolated. But it promised a community beyond the township where he would find more acceptance.
These difficulties became his strengths and guided him into a bright future. In isolation he found solace in books, highbrow books. At 14 he read Bertrand Russell on the history of modern philosophy. “It helped me pass the time.”
As such this quiet intellectualism carried him from a young age. His obsession with books and then writing fuelled an obsession to create a magazine. Dubbed Black Book it was so popular at his school that it came to replace the school newspaper and eventually started to circulate among other schools.
“My mom would drive me to her office, a few hours away in Kuruman. When no one was around we would print all the issues.”
Despite his literary and philosophical leanings, he admits that at that point he wasn’t thinking of fashion from a conceptual point of view, fashion as a “text” of sorts. That would come later when he studied at Lisof fashion college in Joburg.
“I liked a fabulous look; it was for me always about the glamour. But I think as I as I grew up, and I started going into spaces which intellectualised fashion and taught me how fashion could be used as a vehicle. I started to see it as an opportunity, you know, to really tell those stories.”
The stories he feels the most compelled to share are those about South Africa, his family, community and the country’s history. This is the archive he sifts through in looking for inspiration for his collections. He is interested in countering onedimensional views Europeans have of South Africans, but also in a sense tying up all the literal threads that have shaped his own identity.
He has delved into traditional healing through his 2021 collection Alchemy, with an abstract print derived from an arrangement of objects thrown by a sangoma. The 2020 collection Prosopography took inspiration from the Black Sash.
“We are complex; we sit on so many intersections. I grew up with slaughter ceremonies. We did traditional things. But I also watched MTV and engaged with pop culture.”
These multiple influences not only shape his fashion, which is the result of a layered postmodern lexicon, but his films, which are a creative extension of his fashion practice.
“I want people to gain access into all the back work that’s been done for that collection. Yes, we’re presenting you with the collection, the dress, the output, but film also allows me to contextualise that. So, you understand what, where all those ideas are coming from and what I want those dresses to say. I feel very empowered by the use of film.”
As his collections Anthro (Autumn/ Winter 2020), propelled by the death of his grandmother, and Genealogy (Spring/summer 2022), inspired by old family photos, suggest, his family and their dress sense has influenced his creative output the most.
“We didn’t have a lot of resources or a lot to our disposal so we had a
very interesting sort of DIY aesthetic, which translated beautifully. I think I got that sense that fashion can really be armour from my mother.”
Magugu’s reverence for the women in his family and his Tswana and Sotho heritage, has manifested into a logo depicting sisterhood.
“I grew up with a family of mainly women. It’s hard to say but men don’t really exist right now in my universe. I grew up with really incredible, headstrong women.”
In refracting the styles and fashions worn by the women in his family through a high-fashion luxury fashion label, Magugu has been able to reconcile with growing up in an unequal society.
“I use the brand to readdress all those things that I found embarrassing growing up. All the aesthetics, laminated floors, the sort of cheapness if you will. I bring my experience growing up into my brand and throw it back up into a luxury space. I think it’s healing for me.
“It almost takes away shame from people who lived in those conditions or are still living at those standards.
“The brand in its own way helps people see themselves.”
To review or shop Thebe Magugu collections or watch the films or read the texts that underpin them, visit www.thebemagugu.com