Mzukisi Mbane walked through the door and never looked back

By rights, Mzukisi Mbane should be sitting in a glass office in the Cape Town city bowl, interrogating spreadsheets and worrying about other people’s tax. The colourful designer who makes a big splash wherever he goes, first studied accounting when he was deciding what career to pursue. He was, by his own admission, “a nerd”. But what the university timetable didn’t factor in was that the man from Khayelitsha arrived on campus dressed like he’d taken a wrong turn out of an art-school fashion studio: bright colours, earrings, prints that expressed themselves in capital letters.

“In the accounting class, I was always the one the lecturers picked on because they couldn’t miss me,” he laughs. “I’ve always stood out and been expressive. The creative side has always been there.”

The creative side was there long before the balance sheets. His mother was a seamstress; there was an old sewing machine at home, its potential quietly humming in the corner. At 23, with a degree under his belt and a sensible life laid out ahead of him, Mbane woke up one morning and did the least sensible thing a nerd would think of: he asked his mother to show him how to use it.

“I remember just playing with the sewing machine and it felt so natural,” he says. “Like it was something I’ve done before, or something I’m meant to do.”

Accounting gives you forecasts and projections. A sewing machine gives you a door. Mbane walked through it and has never looked back.

In his early designing days he went to a fabric shop in the Cape Town CBD – Studio 54 in St George’s Mall – with the confidence of a man who knew absolutely nothing. “I introduced myself to the owner and said, ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for but I know what I want to achieve’,” he says. The owner assigned a staff member to help him and they immediately got on like old friends with the same sensibilities. “We’re still friends,” he says. “Everything grew from there.”

If this were a fashion biopic, it would cut to the montage: the late nights, the scraps of cloth, the first wonky garments. In real life, it was less glamorous and more grind. Mbane interned at Mercedes-Benz Cape Town Fashion Week, shuttling clothes in and out of backstage like a glorified laundry assistant. But even there, he treated the catwalk as his natural habitat.

“I’ve always been very intentional,” he says. “If I’m going to be an intern at fashion week and I want to be a designer, then I’m going to show up every day like I’m already part of it.” He arrived for his internship in looks he’d made himself – vivid, structural, impossible to ignore.

One day, creative director Simon Deiner walked into the interns’ room, looked around and said he wanted “the most fashionable one” in the group. It was, of course, Mbane. He and producer Jen Boucher were running a company called Group of Creatives - and they did what the gods of fashion occasionally do for those who hustle: they opened a door.

They put him in charge of wardrobe at the first South African Menswear Week in 2015 – backstage logistics, all designers, all looks. He did the job, and then some. “I’ve always done more than expected,” he says. “If you need something, I’ll do it, even if I’m ‘just’ the intern.”

Halfway through the event, Boucher realised Mbane also had his own brand. “They said, ‘Do you have stuff to showcase? We’ll give you the foyer and you can do an installation.’ I didn’t really have enough – but I made it work,” he grins. Mannequins were found, looks were pulled together, media interviews, and Imprint – born out of an earlier label called Swagger Diariez – stepped out of the foyer and into the light.

After that, the dominoes fell quickly. A fully funded runway slot at the next SA Menswear Week. A collection called Our Roots, meditating on Africa as the source of everything. A show at Cape Town Fashion Week. An invitation to Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Ghana. A scouting from there to Africa Fashion Week Nigeria. All in the same year.

“2015 literally changed my life,” he says. “After that one show, all the doors started opening.”

What has walked through those doors since is an Afro-futurist, Pan-African riot of colour and print that refuses both minimalism and apology. Imprint is not a brand for people who want to disappear. Its clothes arrive in a room ten seconds before you do and sit down with their legs crossed, lips pouting.

“One thing about Imprint is being rooted in African storytelling,” says Mbane. “When I started, I was drawn to colour and print, but I wanted the prints to be about us. I wanted a reflection of what Africa is now – inclusive. Prints that can be worn by anyone, exist anywhere, but still be connected to the story of Africa.”

His silhouettes have strutted runways from Cape Town to Ghana, New York and Shanghai. Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire UK have all pointed their cameras at his work. US singer and actor Billy Porter wore an Imprint suit sourced in New York, without Mbane being in the room. “For them to connect with the brand and its story, without me there, that’s what I always wanted,” he says. “The storytelling must travel on its own.”

This last year has been his victory lap: SA Style Awards winner, GQ cultural influencer, Feather Awards designer of the year, and a Sports, Arts and Culture Award for fashion and textile design. “It’s been the year Imprint is visible and rewarded all over the world,” he says, sounding bemused. “And it’s also our 10th anniversary.”

The brand has spread horizontally as well as vertically: bags, accessories, wardrobes for Netflix series, custom pieces for weddings and red carpets, rugs and furniture in collaboration with Cape Town textile studio Heirloom. Imprint, quite literally, underfoot. Homeware lines spun out of fashion collections. The clothes have become rooms; the rooms have become worlds.

And yet, when he talks about the future, it’s not another fashion week he describes. It’s a factory in the Eastern Cape.

“It doesn’t sit well with me that we have so many unemployed youth in the Eastern Cape and so much land and resources not being used,” he says. A trip to Shanghai, watching how efficiently China uses its people and skills, clicked something into place. “I want to open a manufacturing plant. A place where we manufacture clothes and rebuild our textile industry. Because Imprint tells African stories – and for me that means people must be part of producing the story.”

His latest collection, shown at The President Hotel in Bantry Bay last week, is called Indalo Somandla – God’s Creation – inspired by four southern African butterflies. “For the first time, I wanted to tell African stories from the perspective of nature, not us,” he explains. The butterfly – awkward, unbeautiful beginnings, improbable transformation – is an obvious metaphor for someone from Khayelitsha who once played with his mother’s sewing machine and now designs for the world.

But the larger metaphor is this: a continent that refuses to stay in its assigned shape. Patterns that insist we were never background, always foreground. Clothes that act like billboards for a future in which African stories aren’t an exotic capsule; they’re the main attraction.

“I don’t just want to be playing with fabrics,” he says. “I want to leave a mark.”

Too late. He already has.