When Li Edelkoort returns to South Africa, local creatives in a variety of disciplines tend to pay attention. The Dutch trend forecaster — the woman credited with predicting everything from the decline of fast fashion to the return of craft and, ironically, the end of trend cycles — doesn’t travel lightly. Her presence always signals that something big is about to happen.
Last Monday night, that something was the unofficial launch of Cape Town Art Week and Cape Town Fashion Week, which took place in a downtown apartment.
Edelkoort was in town alongside her long-time collaborator, the creative strategist Philip Fimmano, and acclaimed South African designer Lezanne Viviers to open “The Last Straw: From Needle Point to Infinity Point”, a fibre-focused exhibition exploring fashion’s environmental breaking point.
But before the exhibition settled into the formal rhythm of the week ahead, it made its debut in a far more theatrical setting: the penthouse at Mutual Heights, the Art Deco landmark in Cape Town’s city centre.
The gathering — known simply as “The Art Party” — has become the unofficial opening act of Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Cape Town Furniture Week, the moment when the city’s creative tribes assemble before the official festivities begin. In its second year, the party already has a reputation for being effortlessly glamorous — and one of the social calendar’s most coveted invitations.
Designers, collectors, editors, stylists, artists and media personalities streamed into the building’s monumental marble foyer, designed for precisely this sort of entrance.
The evening was hosted by Viviers, Charl Edwards, editor of House & Leisure, and Hannerie Visser of Studio H, with Soho House supporting the event.
The idea, Viviers explains, began almost accidentally when House & Leisure magazine planned to feature her apartment. “Charl had the idea to invite people into the space during Art Fair week,” she says. “Mutual Heights has this beautiful 100-year-old Art Deco foyer that already feels like a red-carpet arrival.”
Mutual Heights — with its geometric detailing and cinematic lobby — provided the perfect setting. Guests arrived in the lobby beneath carved stone columns before ascending to the penthouse, where art, fashion and design unfolded across rooms overlooking the city.
For Viviers, hosting the event at home rather than in a gallery was essential. “It creates a far more intimate connection,” she says. “It becomes about collaboration rather than presentation.”
That sense of collaboration has become something of a philosophy for Viviers, whose work as a designer frequently dissolves the boundaries between fashion, art, installation and, in this case, even food.
“Nothing exists in isolation,” she says. “Fashion, art, design — they’re simply different ways of expressing all the creative ideas we have as South Africans.”
For Edwards, the apartment also offered a symbolic starting point for the city’s design week. “It was about kicking off Art Fair events and Furniture Week through the lens of a home,” he says. “Mutual Heights is such an iconic building. We wanted to activate it — to bring it to life through art, furniture and design.”
More importantly, he adds, the evening was less about the exhibition than about bringing people together. “The focus was really on the people who make this city creative — the artists and designers themselves.”
At the centre of the night was the exhibition, co-curated by Viviers with Edelkoort and Fimmano.
The latter two are co-founders of the World Hope Forum, an international platform promoting socially and environmentally responsible approaches to culture, design and industry. The exhibition explores fashion’s environmental tipping point, using natural and animal fibres — wool, mohair, alpaca and other tactile materials — to question how the industry values labour, land and craft.
The title is intentionally blunt. “Fashion’s last straw is the plastic waste we keep dumping into our oceans and soil,” Viviers says. “We all have to take responsibility for the choices we make.”
The exhibition brings together a wide roster of designers and artists, including Bubu Ogisi, Ronel Jordaan, Naked Ape, Nwabisa Ntlokwana and many others, whose works blur the boundaries between garment, sculpture and textile installation.
Throughout the evening, garments made from natural fibres moved through the apartment in a salon-style presentation curated by Viviers and styled by Kristi Vlok — part fashion show, part living exhibition.
If the clothes explored the language of fibre, the food answered in kind. In the kitchen and dining areas, Hannerie Visser of Studio H collaborated with food designer Juwan Beyers to create a menu that mirrored the exhibition’s material focus.
“We treated ingredients the way you’d treat fibre,” Visser explains. “Pulled, braided, woven, stitched.”
The result was less traditional catering and more edible installation: braided fior di latté cheese, hand-woven cracker breads, fruit leather stitched together like fabric and a savoury mosbolletjie cake with lamb jam. “For us, food becomes part of the spatial narrative,” Visser says. “It’s a temporary artwork — something you experience and then it disappears.”
The emphasis on craft echoed Edelkoort’s long-standing argument that the future of design lies not in speed or novelty but in slower, more thoughtful making.
As the evening unfolded, glasses of Krone MCC circulated through the rooms and conversations drifted between sustainability, textiles and the possibility that craft might save us from ourselves.
Outside, the galleries were still preparing their openings and the art fair stalls were being assembled. But inside Mutual Heights — beneath Deco chandeliers and surrounded by wool, mohair and a crowd of beautifully dressed optimists — Cape Town’s creative season had already begun. With ultimate style — and with Li Edelkoort watching.
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