SA Fashion Week encourages designers to experiment

02 Oct '13

2 min read

RAMP IT UP #1 is the first in a series of experimental performance and fashion related initiatives by The November Project, a new performance and publishing platform created by Mary Corrigall. This first iteration will run at SA Fashion Week (SAFW) from October 3 to 5 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Rosebank.

As the title suggests the project is focussed on the significance of the ramp not only as a site for fashion display, but the spatial and performative politics attached to this narrow strip. This temporary structure is the physical and ideological locus where ideas about what is ‘in fashion’ and what is ‘wearable’ or ‘unwearable’ are negotiated and tested.

Artists, choreographers, designers, a filmmaker and performers will present work on and off the ramp, engaging with this theme, while reflecting on its significance within the history of SAFW, where the dynamics attached to the ramp have shifted during its evolution. The aim is to generate a kind of ‘metafashion’; an expression that reflects on fashion.

Nelisiwe Xaba, winner of the FNB Art Fair Award 2013, has collaborated with Ella Buter of Superella to create a work that presents garments the fashion intelligentsia dubbed ‘unwearable’ for editorial purposes. Xaba will also present a solo performance in StrangeLove clothing designed by Carlo Gibson, meditating on accruing masculine power through dress.

Accidental fashion show moments from previous Clive Rundle shows will be revisted and reinterpreted. Up and coming avant garde designer Tzvi Karp will unleash his most unwearable designs on the public before surrendering control of their fate to them.

The sartorially conscious performance collective V.I.N.T.A.G.E (headed by Ashwin Bosman and Lee-ché Janecke) will infiltrate the audience, amplifying how their behavioural patterns respond to and impact on the fashion show environment.

There will be screenings of Chloe Coetsee’s Wear It Again (2012) fashion film, which presents a quasi-ramp show in an incongruent natural setting that defies the conventional fashion environment, playing out in slow motion it prolongs the act of viewing. RAMP IT UP #1 is created and curated by art critic and journalist Mary Corrigall in collaboration with artist and writer Murray Kruger, the project’s assistant curator.

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South African Fashion Week