Central Pillars of SA Fashion Week: People and Jobs
SA Fashion Week’s commitment to the industry is first and foremost a commitment to job creation, particularly among women who by far make up the largest segment of workers. Growth for a designer business has a ripple effect on the whole creative fashion value chain, and particularly on job creation.
It equally places enormous value on cultural diversity in the workplace. Through this diversity South African design is uniquely placed to benefit from the immense advantage of multiple ways of seeing and a rich array of skill sets to leverage.
A positive outcome of the regrettable job reduction in the retail sector over the past year is that the design industry has benefitted from being able to draw on the larger pool of top skills more affordably.
REPUTATIONAL CREDIBILITY
In the words of business mogul Richard Branson, “your brand name is only as good as your reputation.”
SA Fashion Week has understood the intrinsic importance of meeting standards of international best practise in all aspects of the business since its inception. Its scrupulously transparent corporate culture and commitment to professionalism at every level, including its production values and the quality of the collections it endorses, has ensured that both its brand name and reputation as the local industry’s premium business-to-business platform remains impeccable.
Equally key to the organisation’s reputational integrity, is its commitment to stay abreast of global trends and moods in fashion and to ensure that these resonate with and are reflected in the local industry.
It has therefore begun to actively encourage both awareness for the massive global shift to reduce fashion’s ecological impact. SA Fashion Week also works toward large scale transformation by spearheading collaboration between the design community and local producers of sustainable fibres such as responsibly produced cotton, mohair, wool, and leather. Circular Production is encouraged in the form of recycled, upcycled and compostable fabrics among South African designers.
ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS DEVELOPMENT
The worldwide standstill brought about by COVID played havoc with small designer enterprises. It did however also allow these entrepreneurs to pause, to relook, to restructure and reinvent their businesses. They had enforced time to re-evaluate and address skills gaps in their production line either by reskilling or by building new capacity.
In support of this re-engineering process, SA Fashion Week introduced a comprehensive training programme of webinars aimed at broad-based skills development and capacity building. It offered financial management and exposure to the complexities of international online trading in preparation for export.
The programme included webinars with:
Local buyers providing designers with insight into the buying process of boutiques and online stores in South Africa.
International chain stores, like Bloomindales in New York, Harvey Nichols in Doha and Matches Fashion in London which among other carry more than 650 designer brands including Gucci, Saint Laurent, Valentino, Prada, Balenciaga and Acne Studios.
Internationally it linked the South African participants in the Italian embassy’s Fashion Bridges project to a mentorship programme with the team of the multi-brand department store in Milan.
The fruits of these skills-development initiatives were noticeably evident in the calibre of the AW22 Collections shown in October.
VALUE CHAIN DEVELOPMENT
SA Fashion Week is the country’s only B2B marketing platform wholly focused on developing and marketing the full value chain of our creative fashion industry. This includes associated service industries such as modelling, hair-and make-up sectors.
MODEL INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
The National Association of Model Agencies (NAMA) is the registered non-profit company established in 1976 to ensure that the modelling sector is governed according to highest ethical and professional standards. SA Fashion Week books models exclusively from agencies affiliated, and therefore regulated, by NAMA. This ensures optimum transparency and safeguards against exploitation of potentially vulnerable models.
An integral part of SA Fashion Week’s ability to tell the stories curated by its designers, both nationally and internationally, are the models who bring the garments to life. A fresh face has the potential to inject excitement into a designer’s collection. In turn, a model’s career can be fast-forwarded exponentially through the visibility afforded by exposure generated by this platform.
In collaboration with the Mall of Africa, SA Fashion Week launched the Africa’s Face of Fashion competition for women and men in 2019. 63 females and 32 males participated. The ten new male and female finalists as well as the overall winners in each category, Tristan Wesson (male) and Maréva Mpeti (female), both of Johannesburg, were introduced to the industry and made their debut.
