by Paris — These designers may be a brand new creative class to make a splash during Paris Fashion Week but they bring with them the experience and wisdom passed on by their ancestors, be it their parents, three generations of their family or even centuries at involve them. for the love of the craft.
Maxhosa Africa
By the time South African designer Laduma Ngxokolo launched his label Maxhosa Africa in 2011 at the age of 24, he already had plenty of experience.
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“I count more than 100 years because the Xhosa people have been practicing amazing beads for hundreds of years,” he said during a preview with WWD.
Ngxokolo’s first taste of textile creation came around the age of 15 when his mother introduced him to a knitting machine shortly before she died.
He then studied textile design and pattern at school before graduating in textile design and technology at Nelson Mandela University in his hometown of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He followed it with a two-year master’s course at Central Saint Martins in London, where he was awarded a scholarship and chose the subject track for the future.
Maxhosa Africa started as a thesis project based on the idea of a fashion range for Xhosa initiatives. As part of the coming of age traditions of South Africa’s second largest cultural group which counts Nelson Mandela and human rights activist and theologian Desmond Tutu in its ranks, young men donate belongings of their youth, including their clothes, to away.
“My concept was to offer an alternative to [them] not influenced or inspired by the West,” said Ngxokolo, who personally found that popular choices were often rooted in an unattractive colonial dress code.
A self-confessed Missoni fan, he saw knitwear as the best medium to transfer traditional beads. Not only do both techniques rely on pixel-like unit networks – stitch or bead – but the artistic approach of the Italian brand showed the way he wanted “our [Xhosa] art in an African-centric way.”
While Ngxokolo is interested in contributing to the preservation of his cultural heritage for the next generation, he is certain that people will approach the brand as a high-end fashion line, one that is “sacred to the celebration of culture.”
“Culture is amazing so it can be celebrated around the world as much as people celebrate heritage,” he said. “My culture is bold and unusual but the point I wanted to make is that culture can be fashionable, delicious and worn on a daily basis – if done right.”
Contemporary shapes brought to life the patterns he had painstakingly researched by circulating in museums across South Africa and the project turned into the brand in a matter of months. Five years later, the first Maxhosa Africa flagship was opened in Johannesburg.
Today the brand has five stores in its home country and is opening a six-month pop-up soon on Canal Street in New York City. 65 percent of the business is owned by women, offering men’s and women’s designs showcased during the annual Mxs Kulture Festival one-day event that blends music, food and textile making.
It was ripe at the moment to take the brand, which sells from $400 for a top up to $1,500 for long and intricate dresses, to the wider stage. He offered wholesale early but pulled back after too many one-off projects that lasted a season, with no return, he said.
Also the brand’s debut in Paris on March 3rd is not a major step in his development, but a turning point in Ngxokolo’s career.
Not only is he a new father, but he’s passed the resurrection of his 300-employee company over to his younger sister to focus on design and adding homewares and maybe even a baby line.
“This is my reincarnation, starting the brand from scratch and taking a very fresh new approach,” he said with obvious relish.
Renaissance Renaissance
For Cynthia Merhej, her Renaissance Renaissance label is the culmination of the experience of three generations: her great-grandmother, who had an atelier in Jaffa, in what was then Palestine; her mother Laura and aunt, and her own mother in Beirut.
But it is also a story about renewal and keeping hope alive in difficult circumstances, as the name suggests.
Growing up in the aftermath of Lebanon’s 30-year civil war, “everything had fallen apart and was just starting to rebuild,” the designer recalled. “A lot of what I learned about design, culture, art and so on came from a huge curiosity and a desire to see what’s out there.”
Initially attracted to fashion – how could she not be, having spent her childhood at her mother’s knee – she grew disillusioned with it in her teens, favoring photography and drawing.
Leaving Lebanon for London led the creative youth back to fashion, even as she took visual communication and performance courses at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art.
“But everything I was doing definitely went back to fashion, my first love, [particularly] because I’ve always seen storytelling through clothes,” she said. Back to Beirut and her mother’s atelier she went, determined that she had to try fashion.
Two years of full-time work gave her the capital she needed to launch her own brand in 2016. The next few years were even tougher as Merhej was “working five other jobs because this had to grow organically” while learning tailoring and crafts, she said.
The first collection emerged when the 2019 financial crisis hit her home country and Merhej and her husband were stranded in Paris. Selected as part of Net-a-porter’s Vanguard program in 2020, the brand was on the rise when COVID-19 hit.
She was back in Beirut when the 2020 explosion occurred at the city’s port, which left hundreds dead, thousands injured and scores without homes or livelihoods. “It was very much like being stuck on a roller coaster and not knowing when it’s going to end,” she said.
Still, she continued. The brand’s atelier was opened in the capital of Lebanon in 2022, under the direction of Merhej’s mother and due to the designer’s belief that production in his home country is essential to foster creativity anew in the traumatized country.
With prices starting around €120 for tops and €200 for denim, dresses between 500 and 1,100 euros and coats up to 1,200 euros, Renaissance Renaissance will also be introducing a knitwear collaboration with second-generation family-owned brand Bielo, bowing for fall 2024. .
Bringing her collections to market in Paris informally has already put Merhej’s work on another radar.
The designer was tapped to create the costumes for an upcoming adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse,” the seminal 1954 novel by French author Françoise Sagan, starring Chloë Sevigny.
Julie Kegels
“For me, it’s about finding a balance between beauty and ugliness, seriousness and mockery because I just want to have fun when I’m designing,” Belgian designer Julie Kegels told WWD ahead of her debut collection. “I want to feel a lot of emotions while also stepping out of my comfort zone.”
For this native of Antwerp, fashion design was a dream that she nurtured from childhood, especially because she grew up between leather and fabric swatches after her father, “a very creative and creative man” who works in accessories and bags .
The next natural step was to score a place in the prestigious fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where she honed her skills under the tutelage of Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Van Saene.
After graduating in 2021, Kegels found herself in that “weird time because you have this nice [graduate] collect and then you don’t know what to do,” she said.
The first ideas for a brand of the same name came, as did a series of projects, including a collaboration with the contemporary label Essential Antwerp. But she decided to cut her teeth at Meryll Rogge and Pieter Mulier at Alaïa first.
Finally, her dream of launching her brand came true. “I always wanted to start something when the time was right, but I thought if I waited too long, I’d be a little scared,” she said.
Her opening pitch is “about this woman who could be anything she wants so she can choose what she wants to be but she has duals,” she said.
Her first collection is shown in Belgium, Italy and Portugal between 100 euros for small accessories and up to 2,500 euros for a leather coat. The dresses will come in between 700 and 1,000 euros.
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