Close-up | Dressing Team SA for the Olympics no easy win in the absence of shared nationhood, writes Fred Khumalo in his latest Close-up column
This at a time when dreadlocks were a loud declaration to the apartheid police: “Come and arrest me, or come and search my house, for I might have a stash of banned books and/or some marijuana to boot.”By the time I started working as a journalist, I’d abandoned the dreadlocks after discovering they were a turn-off to girls. You laugh. The things we do for girls.
Anyway, I conveniently closed my ears to the tirades from my comrades. I kept my perm. And it was not just a regular perm. I got the greasiest one, which was called the Peabo Bryson – after one of the popular musicians of the time. To get the Peabo Bryson look, the hair stylist had to stretch your hair all the way to the collar of your shirt.
For a moment there, when I looked at those pictures, I thought I was looking at people attending an Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging bosberaad or a gathering of game rangers from Kruger National Park. But why am I telling you this? All this old man is trying to say is I know a thing or two about fashion. Which is why I cannot keep quiet any longer about one of the biggest sins committed in the name of fashion. Yes, you saw the outfit that was foisted on those lovely kids representing our country at the Olympics.
To use the language of the woke generation, the black designers “did not have agency”. Which, in simple English, means that they did not make the decisions.So, what you saw on that stage in Japan was not a reflection on the designers. These young fashion designers are pawns in a corner of the South African fashion world that still bows to white hegemony. Ah, I finally get to use that word!
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