SA Fashion Week set out to change a situation that needed to transfigure into a new culture. In the final decade of the pre-democratic era, shifts were happening in all spheres, including the clothing industry.

The 17 designers who showed at the inaugural SA Fashion Week, in 1997, became pioneers of a completely new way of viewing and engaging with fashion. For the first time, they showed integrated and comprehensive collections of their own and independent creative vision.

There are so many paradoxes that exist in the world of fashion. They reflect the great choices that we are confronted with in our brave new world.

SA Fashion Week leads the charge to galvanise local brands, the designer community, and retailers to embrace the increasingly urgent global move towards a sustainable fashion ethos. This will enable consumers to adopt planet-friendly fashion consumption in turn.

The SA Fashion Week Student Competition is open to final-year students at any of the fashion colleges or universities in South Africa. It identifies the designers of the future, and for the designer, it is a stepping-stone to running a successful business and a great way to stand out from the crowd and create brand awareness.

The New Talent Search is South Africa’s most prestigious fashion award. Introduced by SA Fashion Week in 1998, previous winners include established designers such as Jacques van der Watt of Black Coffee, David Tlale, and more recently, Mmusomaxwell, Artho Eksteen and Thando Ntuli of MUNKUS.

The value of competitions lies in their capacity to generate excitement on many levels. New or relatively unknown designers use them to demonstrate their creative vision to an influential handpicked audience of media and ardent followers of fashion. They are always delighted by the opportunity to innovate.

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.

The opening up of lockdown levels towards the latter part of 2021, allowed SA Fashion Week to inject much-needed designer visibility with the introduction of its first hybrid presentation format fusing digital broadcasting with pared-down eventing.

SA Fashion Week, as well as the creative fashion industry it represents, has never had to rewrite the rules quite as fundamentally as during 2021.

In time to come, I believe, 2021 will be remembered as the juncture that changed the future of South African fashion design. It was a year filled with opportunities.