A-list fashion designer David Tlale is partnering with the South African Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture to find, groom and promote the country’s next generation of fashion and design students, offering them a position to show at the prestigious Mercedes Benz Fashion and Design Week.
This is similar to the LFDW Fashion Focus, the Lagos Fashion and Design Week’s fashion mentorship programme in collaboration with the British Council.
The Fashion Focus programme offers 16 young designers the opportunity to put on a fashion show at the annual showcase. Started in 2013 as a personal effort to engage emerging designers through an in-house internship at the David Tlale atelier, the program has grown to become a government sponsored initiative. It has become the internship to aim for, giving emerging student designers unimaginably important showcase and networking opportunities.
Now in it’s fourth year, this season’s recipients of the showcase programme are Cindy Mfabe, Maxwell Welile Boko, Mbali Buthelezi, Siphosile Masangano, Ntando Ngwenya; all of whom showed capsule collections at the 2016 MBFWJ.
Expect full reviews of the individual collections in the coming days, but for now see it all in motion in the Africa Fashion International made short film of the showcase.