Sindiso Khumalo — the internationally acclaimed, super lovely, painfully cool, terribly clever textile designer, winner of the LVMH prize, et cetera, et cetera — has naturally been high on my Cape Town Hot Lunch list for ages.
But more so since she opened her first stand-alone store in March in Gardens. As it happens I was struggling to get to the mountain but sometimes the mountain comes to Johannesburg and so I took my gap and met her at Kleinsky’s, the other Capetonian institution that has opened its gloriously yellow umbrellas on the Birdhaven pavement and is currently supplying us with its signature bagels.
Sindiso was a child of exile, born in Botswana. She went to boarding school in Pretoria and Cape Town. “They were the safe schools. My mother could not even come into the country, we had to say goodbye in Botswana.”
She studied architecture at the University of Cape Town and was working in London for superarchitect Sir David Adjaye and seemed set on a path involving design on a grand scale. But her heart was in fashion. Her mother had a flair for it, making her own clothes from Burda patterns, her grandmother was a patternmaker and Adjaye encouraged her passion.
“I was cheating on architecture with fashion, because I wasn’t looking at any architectural books or magazines and David said to me, ‘Sindi are you sure this is what you want to do?’
“I was like, well you know? And he said, ‘Why don’t you think about fashion? All you have is Vogues, and all you read when you go into my library, other Vogues and the Louis Vuitton books and the Chanel books.’ So that’s how it also kicked off.”
She went to Central St Martin’s, one of the top fashion schools in the world, to do her master’s degree.
“I chose textiles, just because I was actually still not sure if I completely wanted to move away from architecture. And I’m grateful I chose textiles because it really enables me to understand what the core elements of fashion are. It is about the textile and it is such a huge part of our storytelling.”
She styled and worked for Woolworths for several years before venturing into her own label, first focusing on men's wear and then taking the leap into women’s wear. I remember her first collection, I wanted one of everything not just because it was gorgeous but because the clothes felt significant.
“I think, crucially for me, I can say whatever I want. I had a collection that was based on Harriet Tubman. Slavery is such a hard topic, and probably an even harder topic to discuss within the context of fashion sense, because I still need to try and sell the garments.
What is the point of me in this? Why am I making more clothes? We don’t need anything, you know
“And we made these beautiful pink dresses, and I made a beautiful cotton print of an actual cotton plant. It was red, almost like the blood of the child, but it was a print. So I was kind of talking about slavery within a print in such a subtle way that you would just think, ‘Oh, it’s a pretty flowery print.’
“It was kind of almost subverting the two. I like to talk about hard subjects but fashion can be seen as very frivolous. So I am trying to bring the two together, a print could be a beautiful flowery cotton plant, or it could be talking to what the slave movement was.”
She points to the trousers she is wearing. “It’s the same thing with these. They are based on the quilts used by the Quakers who used to hang blankets outside to communicate to the runaway slaves.
“The Quakers used to hang North Star blankets, which would inform the slaves that this a safe house — you can rest here. For me, it’s always, how do I talk about the hard subjects of our history and life and put it into a context, so that there’s a meaning?”
We turn to the fashion industrial complex. “For a sustainable designer, it’s always the hardest thing — what is my relevance? What is the point of me in this? Why am I making more clothes? We don’t need anything, you know.
“So that’s why I need to make clothes that mean something and that includes who is making them, how they’re being made. They need to be of service, essentially, because we don’t need any more clothes. So I am slow. I’ve always been slow fashion. I am still slow fashion. I find it’s also better for creativity to work slower. You find things out. It’s a discovery.
“Something is changing in the supply chain. I mean, H&M has a huge programme now on sustainability innovations. So I do think there is a shift happening, especially post-Covid. I feel Covid really was quite a marker in terms of, what do you do, what is your point as a business?”
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