Lucilla Booyzen’s Vision: Building a Fashion Ecosystem
Every great movement has a visionary at its helm, and for South African Fashion Week that visionary is Lucilla Booyzen. A former model turned producer extraordinaire, Booyzen dreamed of an inclusive, thriving fashion industry long before it existed. Her vision wasn’t just about runway glamour; it was about crafting an ecosystem - one that would connect designers to markets, cultivate new talent, and even change how South Africans perceived and consumed fashion. Over 21+ years, Lucilla’s unwavering leadership turned SAFW from a daring idea into a cornerstone institution of African fashion. This blog celebrates how her foresight and passion built the backbone of an entire industry.
Lucilla Booyzen’s journey prepared her perfectly to revolutionize South African fashion. In the 1980s she ran Runway Productions, introducing unprecedented professionalism and theatrical flair to local fashion shows. (In one legendary 1986 show, she sent top model Leigh Harding striding down the catwalk with a live cheetah on a leash, giving Johannesburg a taste of the spectacle and drama that fashion could be!) By the time she founded SAFW in 1997, Booyzen was a seasoned producer with an educator’s heart and a global perspective. She recognised that South Africa’s reintegration into the world post-apartheid was an opportunity to showcase creativity on an international stage. Her vision was clear: designers would become the protagonists, and SAFW would be the stage on which they could shine.
Booyzen’s approach went beyond shows. Early on, she understood that for designers to truly succeed, South Africa needed a fashion “ecosystem” embracing design, production, consumption, and critically, the business of fashion. She tirelessly forged networks, bringing together stakeholders from artisans to retailers, and sought sustainable partnerships across the supply chain. Under her guidance, SAFW became the only business-to-business platform of its kind in Africa, promoting designers not just at seasonal events but year-round. This holistic strategy helped merge fashion creativity with manufacturing, marketing and retail, ensuring that designers weren’t just creating art, but building viable brands.
Crucially, Lucilla Booyzen championed a culture of inclusivity and diversity from the start. In a country healing from a divided past, SAFW under her leadership became a symbol of unity - with models of all backgrounds on the ramp and collections that drew from every corner of South Africa’s cultural tapestry. “It’s one of the most socially inclusive industries in South Africa,” Booyzen noted of fashion’s power to bring people together. She also anticipated the digital transformation of fashion; social media’s rise in the 2010s changed the game and Lucilla embraced it, empowering designers to build their own audiences online.
Behind the scenes, Booyzen was known for her big-sky thinking and persistence. Inspired by international examples (she drew lessons from how Milan reinvented its fashion industry in the 1970s, as detailed in the book Moda a Milano), she sought to adapt global best practices to South Africa’s context. That meant not only glamorous runway shows but also tackling structural challenges like lack of local manufacturing and training. Booyzen spearheaded initiatives to fill these gaps, from mentorship programs to partnerships with retailers - all with the aim of cementing a “design-led fashion industry” in the country.
Lucilla Booyzen’s vision and determination built South African Fashion Week into far more than an event. It became a movement - one that nurtured talent, fostered business, and put South African design on the map. Her story reminds us that with passion and purpose, one person truly can change an industry. As we look back on SAFW’s legacy, we see Lucilla’s fingerprint on every success: in every young designer who got a break, every collaboration formed, and every collection that found its way from a local studio to a global store. Lucilla Booyzen dared to dream big, and in doing so, she gave South African fashion a future as vibrant as her imagination.
