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It’s a chilly Thursday morning at Victoria Yards in Joburg. I’ve been sitting on a concrete step long enough to feel it when Mpumelelo Dhlamini rounds the corner, an enormous green suitcase trundling behind him. The designer and Ezokhetho founder has just landed back in South Africa after a week in Paris competing in Africa Fashion Up, a Balenciaga-backed programme that platforms African designers on one of fashion’s biggest stages.
He greets me warmly before gesturing to the suitcase with a grin: “I haven’t unpacked yet.” I laugh as we head into his studio, the suitcase, still full of Paris, bumping along behind us.
The Soweto-born Dhlamini has been building Ezokhetho, his contemporary womenswear label, for seven years. While the label had previously showcased at fashion weeks in Milan and Amsterdam, Paris was a first, and one that almost didn’t happen. The application to Africa Fashion Up came as an afterthought, submitted on the last day before the competition closed. A few weeks later, he received a call from a French number he didn’t recognise. “I got a call saying you’re one of the winners. So I was like, am I being pranked? I’m going to wait for the email to come through,” he recalls with a laugh.
“Visiting all these luxury houses, I started to understand that there’s no luxury without heritage. Every brand that we see, there’s a story behind it, there’s a beginning behind it.
The collection he brought to the Africa Fashion Up 2026 showcase, held on June 26 at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, was one that began with a realignment. “I needed to re-evaluate the brand. I needed to sit down and make business sense of every decision I made moving forward,” Dhlamini explains.
The past year had been a relentless one — events, fashion shows and shoots stacking up — so he took a step back from the noise and looked to the past for direction. That introspection led him to Mapetla, an extension of Soweto where he used to visit his grandmother. “I remember when designing the collection, I was inspired by the 1990s, the colour, the retro aspect of it. It reminded me of that time,” he reflects.
The resulting collection is an ode to that life: cinched waists, exaggerated silhouettes, and the colour bars of an old TV test card translated into print. Dhlamini recalls a friend of his who suggested that “people don’t really like being reminded of their roots, the struggle” and sent a Gucci advertisement as a reference: old money, aspirational, and far from Mapetla. Dhlamini heard it, considered it, and went another way entirely.
The lookbook was shot at his grandmother’s house, rollers in the models’ hair just like his aunt used to wear them. The campaign was shot in a nearby tavern, models leaning on an old pool table, before the crew went hunting for magwinya. Another image places the models on a dusty street corner while local kids play soccer and pretend not to watch. The collection was called Mapetla Ext. and it looked exactly like where it came from.
“I do believe that there’s luxury in where we come from,” Dhlamini says. “There’s luxury in the stories that we tell, the memories that we hold. Going back to moments where we sat around with family — the weddings, the funerals, the food, the joy, the life, the culture. That’s what I want to embody within the brand.”
It lands differently once you know that Dhlamini lost both his parents in recent years: his father in 2021 and his mother in September 2024. The losses seem to have sharpened his understanding of what wealth actually means. “Coming from my mum and dad’s passing, you sort of get a different perspective. Yes, there’s the aspect of money and material things, but then there’s another side of it — being surrounded by love, the people who protect you. The stories and those moments that we shared, I hold on to them. And that’s luxury for me.”
His time in Paris only deepened this conviction. Beyond the masterclasses and a full day inside the Balenciaga headquarters, the week offered an immersion in how the world’s most enduring luxury houses think about themselves. “Visiting all these luxury houses, I started to understand that there’s no luxury without heritage. Every brand that we see, there’s a story behind it, there’s a beginning behind it,” he says. “All those stories have, over the decades and centuries, built up to these big empires. That’s what I want — I want to build something that will outlive me, that comes from the roots of South Africa.”
It wasn’t until the night of the showcase, at the private gala dinner at restaurant Les Ombres, that the scale of what was happening fully landed. Amid conversations with senior vice presidents, members of the French embassy and heritage house directors, fellow winner and Imprint designer Mzukisi Mbane leaned over and said quietly: “Do you understand that people from Balenciaga, from the Kering Group, know who we are?”
It was precisely those people, an international jury of key figures from the luxury industry, who elected Dhlamini the winner of the Special Jury Prize in recognition of the world he had built for the brand and the rigour with which he had built it. “Talking to some of the members of the jury at dinner, these weren’t people who didn’t know what they were talking about. They knew your brand and who you are,” he recalls. The advice they left him with was simple: “Be consistent in your storytelling. You’ve managed to build a world outside of what’s normally being taught out there. Broaden that, and one day, even if it takes a bit longer, it’s going to pay off.”
Sitting across from him at a small wooden table at Fama Delicatessen, having just polished off a flatbread spread, the friend and the Gucci campaign ad feel very far away — not because they were wrong about luxury, exactly, but because Dhlamini quietly proved there is more than one way to define it. He went back to Mapetla Extension and came home from Paris with a jury prize. As origin stories go, it’s a good one.
Credits
Creative director: Mpumelelo Dhlamini
Photographer: Ezra Kofi Qua-Enoo
Stylist: Shawn Ntuli
Makeup: Mokgadi Shogole and Smash Sibo Mnyandu
Hair: Ncumisa Mimi Duma
Models: Chika Obi/Invade Models, Thulani Konstabula/Boss Models, and Gibson Cooper/Lampost
Set manager: Candice J
Set assistant: Seàratoa
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