It’s a scorching afternoon in the busy commercial hub of Osu, in Accra, Ghana. Nelly Hagan Aboagye is at her flagship outlet, working dilligently on her exclusive collection for the upcoming Ghana Fashion week, to be held in the first week of October. It is every Ghanaian designer’s dream, but for Aboagye, there is more to it all than meets the eclectic eye.
It all started a few months ago, when Aboagye—a trained surgical nurse, with a love for fashion— heard an advertisement for young, creative entrepreneurs in fashion, on the radio. After being shortlisted as one of the finalists, she worked on a few pieces, which were showcased at the final runway show. The judges awarded Aboagye the title of Young Creative Entrepreneur of the Year in fashion.
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The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. In recent years, she had hoped to monetize her skills in making bespoke fashionable pieces, which are dinstinguished by her trademark beading work. Each bead is delicately woven, by hand, into the fabric in a variety of elegant designs. This isn’t so much a time-consuming process as it is, the bane of a designer working on a shoestring budget with limited time. She made her first two pieces with only 30 Ghanaian cedis.
“I am a self-taught designer. Everything I know, I taught myself and I keep striving towards learning more to improve the quality of my work,” she says.
Runways welcomed Aboagye as she went on to showcase her pieces at the Young Creative Entrepreneurs tour of London and Africa Fashion Week in Johannesburg.
Following an astounding response to her collection, Aboagye, returned to Ghana to employ some man power and invest time in her fashion label—Duaba Serwa.
“Duaba Serwa, is simple sophistication. I prefer understatements to extravagance and believe there is beauty in simplicity. This is what you see, in every piece I make,” she says.
At 26 years old, this half Fanti, half Akuapem, high fashion enthusiast is very optimistic about the future of her infant business.
“I have always been against the idea of angel investors and believe in growing my business organically. Every item purchased for my work is drawn from money that has been re-invested into the business from my own funds, which are generated from sales,” she says.
At the moment, Aboagye and her team have at least 20 dress orders a week with each bespoke, hand-beaded piece, costing nothing less than $300.
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“My clients just love the beading work—the quality and attention to detail you get, when you buy any of my pieces—and are willing to pay for it. The sewing itself, takes about 15 hours. It’s the beading that occupies the bulk of my time and requires the most of my creativity. I take great pride in my work and devote all the time I can give to each piece.”
Months after her break, Aboagye, still finds it somewhat hard to take in.
“I was a nobody just a few months ago and now, the response to my work is just amazing. I’m working round-the-clock with my team and there is no room for anything else but taking Duaba Serwa to newer heights and I want to do it differently.”
She is already planning for the future of her brand. Aboagye, who currently runs a small team of six, is working towards having a bigger factory, stores in major fashion hubs around the continent and opportunities to showcase her unique, contemporary African work on more international platforms.
“I’m thankful for my opportunities. I welcome new challenges and hope to be competing with much bigger names in fashion in the near future and I know it is possible,” she says.
Aboagye’s label has a thriving market on the ground. Ghanaian women are very fashionable and brand-conscious. The streets of Accra lend credence to this with beautiful fabrics and tailored garments visible in most of the metropolises. With her new recognition, aesthetically-pleasing work and business acumen, domination of the Ghanaian market could be as easy as threading her needles; however, Aboagye has fine intentions of bursting through the seams of her home country.
“I hope to have my brand doing just as well in many other countries very soon,” she says.
“On entrepreneurship, I believe in the future of any society that helps empower its youth. This is more than just making clothes,” says Aboagye.
She has employed a couple of orphans in her workshop, teaching them bead weaving.
“I want them to learn this skill and be able to run their own businesses in the future,” she says .
On her background in surgical nursing, she says: “Nursing has taught me to be very humble as it gave me a good perspective on how to treat and handle different people respectfully. This has translated quite well for the manner in which I run my business and deal with my clients”.
From holding scalpels at the cardiothoracic center, to turning heads at international runway shows, Aboagye is weaving her way into fashion aficionados’ hearts, one stitch at a time—all from a little outlet in the heart of Accra.

There’s Something About  Threading The Needle

The South African Ballet was founded in 2001 by former members of the defunct State Theater Ballet, one of these dancers was Dirk Badenhorst. The company opened with a season of Giselle, which was performed at the State Theatre, in Pretoria. After some success, it was invited to perform in Russia, the first South African company to do so.
Badenhorst left the SABT because he wanted to explore and felt stifled.
“We started [the] South African Ballet Theater as an entrepreneurship… These young dancers that we train in South Africa need to be brought up with the idea that ‘I can create my own company. I can create my own work. I can create my own opportunities,” he says.
<div id="attachment_1168" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1168" class="size-medium wp-image-1168" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_0160-300x154.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="154" />Giselle &#8211; First Act</div>
In 2008, he cofounded Mzansi Productions—a classically based contemporary dance company—with Esther Nasser. That same year, he began the International Ballet Competition Gala, taking place every second year and bringing together dancers from across the world.
The SABT and Mzansi Production merged this year to form The South African Mzansi Ballet, (SAMB), of which Badenhorst is CEO. The new company will still perform the classics but will expand its offering to create a wider appeal. It’s a question of evolving to be more contemporary and relevant to an African audience.
Although Badenhorst enjoyed a dance career both in South Africa and abroad, he confesses to never being a fantastic ballet dancer, but has a passion for the art.
To most, ballet is an escape to worlds and times imagined. Not just for the audience but for the dancers themselves. Giselle is a great example. The first act is fun, flirtatious, colorful and light but then the second act transports you to a somber, whimsical, yet still romantic place as Myrtha—the Queen of the Wilis—dances onto the stage. You become transfixed not only by the story but by the amazing ways the dancers’ bodies move, their ability to be strong and graceful at the same time. It’s a beauty like no other.
A ballet patron and former first lady of South Africa, Zanele Mbeki, says it makes her feel as if her soul leaves her body and joins the dancers on stage.
“Ballet is inspirational and aspirational,” says Badenhorst.
The SAMB brought in Michaela DePrince to make her professional debut in its production of Le Corsaire, at the Jo’burg Theater in July. DePrince, from Sierra Leone, was adopted from a refugee camp after her orphanage was bombed. Her father was killed by rebels and her mother died of starvation. Despite this, she held onto the dream of being a ballerina, after seeing one on the cover of a magazine outside the orphanage; she carried the picture to her new home in the States. Once labeled a “devil child” by the care givers at the orphanage, DePrince is now a wonder child.
<div id="attachment_1167" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1167" class="size-medium wp-image-1167" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_3554-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />SABT/Air Products Development School, Alexander</div>
One of the reasons a merger between the SABT and Mzansi Productions made sense, was because it meant pooling the limited funds. The National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund has been a great supporter of ballet in South Africa. The fund gives to non-profit organizations and is legally required to spend 95% of its money on three sectors—including arts, culture and national heritage.
There seems to be competition between classical and contemporary dance and Badenhorst thinks there shouldn’t be, since the audiences are so different. The competition lies in the fact that both disciplines go after the same pot of money.
“When you are fighting for survival, then people find it hard to share,” he says.
Badenhorst feels that the problem of funding hampers the growth of the industry. The South African ballet companies, according to him, are not on par with the rest of the world on a national level. Despite this he thinks that South African dancers have more passion and hunger.
“When a dancer in South Africa gets to a certain level, in South Africa, we lose them to overseas companies because we can’t pay them what they can. We don’t have the stability in South Africa that they have.”
Badenhorst agrees that there is less support from the South African government compared to international companies and their governments. It seems that the new South African government still hasn’t moved away from the notion that this is an art for whites which was generously supported by the apartheid government. In 1994, South Africa’s central government issued a notice ceasing all funding to performing companies. At the time of going to press the South African government had not responded to questions from FORBES AFRICA.
It was once written that South Africans criticized ballet for being “a cost-intensive, Eurocentric art form that has no place in an African country”.
Badenhorst notes that while the elitism of the art in the past was racial, it’s now about talent. He compares it to an Olympic sport.
Despite this racial criticism, companies and schools have created programs targeting disadvantaged children in poor areas. The SAMB has about 500 young ballet dancers enrolled in its program. The Cape Town City Ballet’s (CTCB) Outreach, Audience &amp; Development Training program has reached 310,000 people in the last 15 years.
“When you go to the township and work with the young kids and you see what it does on their ability of experiencing themselves, on understanding their bodies… on their imagination development, then I also understand why I’m doing what I’m doing,” Badenhorst reflects.
Ballet in South African townships can be traced back to the work done by the late David Poole in the 1980s, in Cape Town. Poole was a former ballet master and artistic director of the CTCB, after an international dancing career. Former principal dancer, Philip Boyd carried on this legacy with ballet classes in Gugulethu, Cape Town—back in 1991. Boyd’s Dance for All has been around for more than 20 years and now offers training in diverse dance styles in 2 more townships.
A British charity began giving ballet lessons to children in the slums of Nairobi, to keep them off the streets.
In Africa, children are most likely to be pushed into careers that are thought to pay more or carry more prestige—like being a doctor, lawyer or footballer—rather than ballet.
Ballet requires a lot of commitment and focus in order to excel. Andile Ndlovu is a South African ballet dancer who’s been dancing since the age of 10 and is in his third season with The Washington Ballet. It’s hours of work from an early age and Badenhorst believes that aspiring professional dancers need to be ready to enter a company at the age of 16.
It’s not cheap either. The running cost of a performing company, a year, is around $1.4 million. This money can be gathered through ticket sales, private business and the government—if its lucky.
The SAMB has 60 permanent staff members, including dancers, and employs almost as many temporary staff in season. This art form from the old age European aristocrats may have made its way to the “African bush” but it fails to enjoy the same popularity—leading to companies facing financial strain.
Only a few years ago, the SABT sent out an appeal for funding. Badenhorst, who was not with the company at the time, says that the companies need to be more frugal, cut down on staff and change their models to fit the environment. By 2010, the company had raised $793,000, a sure sign that ballet in Africa is not dead.
For years, Badenhorst has formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the National Ballet of Cuba. The international company is performing abstracts from its best work in South Africa and has included South African dancers, like Kitty Phetla, in the show.
Phetla became the first black ballerina to perform in Russia in her role as The Dying Swan.
Badenhorst’s parting words: “We have to go back and we have to not see it [ballet] as an expense, but as an investment”.

Pirouettes Under The African Sky

In May, Edvard Munch’s The Scream sold for $120 million becoming the most expensive painting to be sold at auction. A week later, Mark Rothko’s Orange, Red, Yellow sold for nearly $87 million. Irma Stern’s Two Arabs sold for R21 million ($2.5 million) last year, the highest price for a painting sold at auction in South Africa. Eleven of the 20 highest prices fetched at auction in the world and nine of the 10 highest prices in South Africa have occurred since 2008.
The near-collapse of the global economy didn’t stop the market reaching its highs. Wealthy collectors remain wealthy. And top-quality items appreciate even in poorer market contexts. Fine art auction house, Strauss &amp; Co, reported a boom in 2010 with a turnover of R187 million ($22.3 million) and a strong market for 2011 making only slightly less at R170 million ($20.2 million).
Despite hammer prices being up, masterpieces are out of the price range of many collectors and dealers. The high end of the market is one part of the story, it’s the segment that appeals to the popular imagination, and to those of us who are so insanely disconnected from the real world that we continue to hope that one day, we too may be able to buy a Malevich or a Twombly.
“The run-of-the-mill part of the market is in a sorry state,” says fine art expert and auctioneer, Stephan Welz.
“At this end of the market, dealers have in the past bought a large percentage of works as stock-in-trade to sell to the average salaried person who wants one or two nice pieces on the mantelpiece.”
It would be silly not to admit we’ve been affected. Those works least affected are those with rarity value; anything decorative has been devastated,” adds Mark Read, director of the Everard Read gallery.
<div id="attachment_927" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-927" class="size-large wp-image-927" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/artauctionauctioneer-1024x755.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="349" />Steven Wlz at the Strauss and Co auction</div>
Given then that the Old Masters and historic paintings are too expensive for most collectors and dealers and, of course, there are fewer of them, dealers both abroad and locally have turned to contemporary artists, which are normally fragile in the secondary market and a highly speculative sector.
For the last two years, contemporary works have topped auction sales at Christie’s—an international company offering art auctions and private sales to clients. In South Africa, artists like Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge, Walter Battiss and Erik Laubscher are fetching good prices as the market broadens. But there are no guarantees of a handsome profit, even if you’ve studied past performance prices, says Welz, and those are less available for contemporary than older works. Some wonder, too, about the staying power of this market compared to those works time has already validated.
Markets, of course, depend not only on buyers, but also on sellers.
“When the market isn’t favorable, sellers are reluctant to sell, and they’re usually in a position to choose their market,” says Welz.
What’s more, sellers don’t know where else to invest their money since opportunities are currently few—stock markets are down, rates on savings accounts are low and interest is taxed, even gold has been volatile.
A conversation between Sotheby’s chair of contemporary art for Europe, Cheyenne Westphal and an anonymous American collector as reported in the Wall Street Journal serves to illustrate the point: “I phoned him up and told him, ‘Do you realize that in the present market, we can get you $50 million for your Rothko?’ There was a very long silence on the other end of the phone. Eventually, he replied, ‘Well, Ms Westphal, that sure is tremendous news. But what the hell would I do with $50 million in the bank?’”
To try to predict prices and understand trends, we turn to the market intelligence provided by public auctions (auctions are fairly transparent compared to private sales, prices are published and annual reports are available) and historical price indexes. But, even armed with these prognostications, one feels uneasy in generalizing across the market.
Part of the reason that trying to draw any conclusions about the health of the art market is so difficult is because that very term is a misnomer. A number of small markets combine to form the art market and while Old Masters are selling, demand for contemporary or modern art pieces may be declining; buyers supporting the fine arts market are not the same people who are buying decorative art.
The Wall Street Journal last month quoted Christie’s international as saying its art business had proved resilient and that a growing population of super-wealthy collectors were sustaining demand for top works. “We have not seen the global economy affect our business,” said Steven Murphy, Christie’s CE. The Mei Moses All Art Index, which measures art market returns by tracking the sale and resale of major art works, mainly in New York and London, claimed an 11% return for investors in 2011, outpacing stock market returns for a second consecutive year. But the problem is that not all art performs equally and most art never gains enough value to be represented at the kind of auction that index compilers track—it’s an incomplete picture. So studies like these fail to provide any proof that art is a solid investment generally.
Some economists explain the market’s relative buoyancy, saying fine art isn’t part of the global economy. Rather, they say, it is part of the booming economy of a set of super-super rich individuals or ‘Ultra High Net Worth Individuals’ who are just growing richer. For these people, and because a painting is singular and no one else can own it, an astronomically expensive work does an almost unparalleled job of saying just how wealthy and cultivated they are.
Let me illustrate what I mean. As I stood in front of the Stern on auction, Arab, I felt a little let down. It was small (66,5 x 65,5cm) and it was beautifully painted, the frame hand-carved, but I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘How can it possibly be worth R9 million [R17 million ($2.0 million) as it turned out]’, and that’s the thing, it isn’t, it signals that you’re spending money, squandering money even because what you’re buying can’t be worth that much. And it’s this fact, the fact that it isn’t a sensible way to make money that drives the trophy hunters.
But perhaps in comparing Arab to the value I would place on a house, I would be too narrowly defining an investment. Today, the value of an artwork is often determined by collectors for whom there is nothing more at stake than making money. Previously, critics and connoisseurs had some influence on which pieces were perceived to be good. “Today’s art market is by and large misinformed,” said veteran advisor Thea Westreich in the New York magazine. “People are using their ears, not their eyes, to select works, buying based on market trends rather than art-historical standards.”
The critic, Clement Greenberg, was right when he said of culture and its place in the economy of life, “a poor life is lived by anyone who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze… without any further end in mind, simply for the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at…” He also said, “there are, of course, more important things than art, life itself, what actually happens to you”.
Overseas, the art market is huge and growing—there is a new class of people buying art. But in South Africa, the market is incredibly small, says Stefan Hundt of Sanlam Private Investments’ art advisory service. “If we have 5,000 serious buyers, it’s a lot,” and adds it’s for this reason that an art fund wouldn’t survive.
If the economy continues to stagnate, Welz and Read anticipate tough times to come. Even if it starts to grow, since the art economy lags behind the normal economy by about a year, it will be some time before private collectors and corporates have any disposable income to invest in art.
Let art be first a pleasure, the prevailing wisdom goes, then an asset. That way, the quality verdicts of the public, which make it a capricious investment, won’t matter so much. As an asset market, says international-capital-markets expert Amir Shariat in the New York magazine, “art remains non-transparent, overly prone to taste and fashions, and extremely illiquid. People forget that illiquid doesn’t mean ‘low price’. It means ‘no price’.”
Perhaps art isn’t even an investment or perhaps it’s an investment of a different nature. There’s an intangible pleasure in owning a painting and, unlike stocks, art doesn’t earn dividends and it costs to keep—you have to look after it, make sure it doesn’t deteriorate and insure it and then there are steep transaction costs. Unlike other investments, the art object is unique, “detached from the sanity of a cause” in Samuel Beckett’s words (though less so when we look at overpriced contemporary works like Damien Hirst’s, which are made with the sale in mind). In being inexplicable, to take Beckett’s reasoning to its conclusion, art objects may be a source of enchantment, and in following the trading of these in the financial arena, emptied for a moment of the wonder they can inspire in quieter moments, we can forget that.

The Art of Art

Forty-six-year-old Dean Simon is a simple man. Wearing a printed t-shirt, jeans and black shoes, his house appears as normal as any family home. Well, at least until you turn into the dining area and see three giant Wurlitzer jukeboxes shining brightly at you in their green, red and yellow colours. If you take a closer look inside, you’ll see stacks of vinyl loaded with songs dating back to the blues of the 1950s. You can pick a track, push a button and watch as the selected record slides out and the needle glides on top, playing the tune, indeed a rare sight these days.
<div id="attachment_478" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-478" class="wp-image-478 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/317-6_1-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Artist Dean Simon at his home in Johannesburg; 19 January 2012 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff</div>
For an artist who has sold out his work before the opening of an exhibition and has clients in Africa, the Middle East and the United States, Simon shies away from the limelight. He has no website, no Twitter account or Facebook page. He says he tries his best not to associate himself with projects that require hype or media attention.
“Stay under the radar and let your work speak for itself,” he says.
Simon has done this so well that even those in the Johannesburg art world claim not to know him.
His work is confusing; one of his works on Mandela has hung for years, without drawing much comment, on the walls of the plush Saxon Boutique Hotel in Johannesburg.
By contrast, another of his works on Mandela drew fire from the media and art world. The work for a private client, called The Last Supper, depicts Mandela in the place of Jesus, with Ghandi to his right and Martin Luther King Junior to his left.
“It’s always been word of mouth and low key. I find that it is more peaceful not to stick your head out,” he says.
“The gallery scene is based on hype and ego and I’m not interested. By the time you are done with a gallery, they have taken a chunk of your salary. People come to me to buy my work.”
This explains why most of Simon’s clients are private collectors, so most of his best work is kept away from public eyes.
“It’s a double-edged sword, though, because collectors keep their stuff private, but for me it is about building a reputation with the people who are going to buy my stuff.”
Would that explain, to an extent, why he may not be a household name in his own country? Whether it does or not, Simon’s work has managed to land him an exhibition in a museum in Los Angeles in April. It is called From Hurt to Hope, a series of works he had initially compiled into a calendar. It is now to be exhibited at the Museum of Tolerance, a museum aimed at educating people about inequality and injustice.
“My theme is people who had a bad upbringing or hard backgrounds but despite that, not getting bitter, but becoming icons. It’s also based on racism; if these people had been murdered or assassinated, the world wouldn’t be the same,” says Simon.
The aim is to educate the world about people who are not necessarily famous, but who have had an impact on the way the world is today—people such as holocaust survivor Felix Zandman.
“He survived the war; he lived underground for 17 months with his uncle, who taught him maths to keep him from going mad. It’s not stuff people know about.”
Two of his subjects are genocide survivors.
The first is Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who survived the holocaust. He coined the term genocide (derived from the Greek word genos; meaning tribe or race, and the Latin word cide; meaning killing) in order to make such mass killings a crime against humanity. Lemkin died in 1959, aged 59.
Another of Simon’s subjects is Rwandan genocide survivor, Imaculee IIibagiza. Her entire family was wiped out during the war by the time she was 23, while she hid crammed in a church bathroom for 91 days. Since then, she has spread the message of reconciliation and forgiveness among victims and perpetrators, working for the United Nations, writing books and speaking on public platforms.
<div id="attachment_480" style="width: 221px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-480" class="wp-image-480 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Army-camo-Dean-Simon-211x300.jpg" alt="" width="211" height="300" />Camouflage</div>
“Had they been terminated, the world wouldn’t be the same. The exhibition says these people came from nothing and did something selfless that changed the world,” says Simon.
The amount of research and preparation for each work is crucial; the small details can make or break an image.
Talent without preparation is wasted, according to Simon; just doing research on a piece can take him anything from three to four months, excluding the actual time spent drawing. That, on its own, can take a month or more, with 13- to 16-hour days spent working on completing the image.
“You have to make sure the detail is really accurate; it’s like starting a jigsaw puzzle [in your head]. The work is very tiring, though.”
His arched back tells the tale of his labors on the floor of his office.
“I wish I had a more conventional mind, it would make life easier.”
Simon realised during his years at the School of Art and Design in Johannesburg that he could visualise three-dimensionality. Soon after graduating from school, he was conscripted into the army, as were most young white males in pre-democratic South Africa. This is where he realised he could make a comfortable living off his talent.
While being your own boss is something most people aspire to, he admits that it does not come easily.
“Working for yourself involves long hours because if you’re disciplined, it means you never take time off. You work seven days a week. My work starts at three in the morning and never ends before eight or eight thirty in the evening.”
The private client who commissioned him to do The Last Supper (and requested to remain anonymous) says he chose Simon after seeing his work in the Saxon. The original copy received a $2 million offer from a banker.
“Dean is very passionate. It’s what makes him different; he changes his topics. He always does all his work on topics he believes in. He’s a good man, but people were like, ‘How could he have done that?’ [But] when Madiba saw it for the first time, he said, ‘What a brilliant idea’, that it was important for people to learn about these people [in the picture].”
The message behind Simon’s most controversial piece to date was to highlight the good that has come out of Africa, and not to dwell on the ‘dark continent’ stereotype.
“The Last Supper was solely for the client, no one was meant to see it except [them]. We wanted to make a statement about Africa; the people [in it] represent tolerance and principles of peace. There are people in that drawing whom I don’t like. It is not about my own personal feelings, it’s about ideals, it was not meant to be blasphemous. I’m not making any apologies for it.”
<div id="attachment_481" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-481" class="size-large wp-image-481" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-RW-1024x696.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="322" />Imaculee Rwanda Lady</div>
His latest project, he says, is set to cause even more controversy than The Last Supper.
“I’m not looking forward to it. Next lifetime I’m coming back as an accountant.”
Surely, most people will look forward to it.

The Secret Artist

Who would have thought that a New York removal man would help turn a budding young artist into a history maker? Well, that’s exactly what happened to South African Conor McCreedy.
A helping hand moving a carpet up to his apartment helped land McCreedy his first solo exhibition, at the National Arts Club jsut down the road—the youngest artist to do so.
“I bought an old third-hand carpet from Iran at an old vintage store and I needed someone to help me move it. So we went to my studio, a four-flight walk up the stairs, and he comes up and sees all this art that I’m working on, adorned on my walls, and he’s like: ‘Holy shit, man, this stuff is crazy! You know what? You’ve got to meet someone.’”
McCreedy moved to New York knowing no one, and having spent most of his youth between a secluded boarding school in KwaZulu-Natal and his home in the gated Melrose suburb of Johannesburg. The last thing the 2005 Hilton College alumnus, with a distinction in art, thought was that this removal man would introduce him to the president of New York’s historic NAC.
The art club, located in the Tilden Mansion in Gramercy Park New York, was founded in 1898. It has an exclusive invitation-only membership, which included three former United States presidents:  Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It also included some of the country’s most important artists and art patrons, such as Andy Warhol.
“I went to boarding school. I know you should never assume, but I did assume. I thought someone who is a mover is not really going to help someone in the art world. I was at a young, tender age and was a bit ignorant.
“He said: ‘You need to go to the NAC—the president of the club is waiting for you.’ So I was like, ‘What is that?’ and he said, ‘Yo, you big dummy, it’s across the street from you—it’s the most historic club in America.’”
It led to an introduction with Alden Jones Junior, NAC president. This meeting saw a solo exhibition for McCreedy, titled Outliers, in 2010.
“That really opened up doors for me; it kind of put me on the map and allowed the world to know who I was and what I was doing. It really helped a lot.”
McCreedy has moved away from styles that made his name, painting abstract animals and portraits, to creating more abstract images with his own style, painting in blues on fine linen.
“You don’t have to paint zebras and giraffes to paint Africa. South African art in New York is quite a niche market. It’s still African art, although some is being created here and some in New York. It is where I feel my proper outlet is now. You finally find your niche; mine is now in blues. Big giant pigments on Belgian linen, French linen and the finest linen you can find, and it’s this big explosion of an ocean. We live in a volatile world, so when you create these oceans, people get lost in this beautiful array of blues. And they like that because it’s kind of like what the ocean does to you.”
His change in style is not only tied to his artistic growth, but also his African roots. With an awareness of the continent’s image among many in the Western world, McCreedy wants his work to change perceptions about Africa and African art.
“I’m trying to get the Western world to understand that Africa is not as bad or poverty stricken as the world sees it. India is way worse, and the poverty in India is so bad, yet they have better investments and the right type of investments going into India, which we do not have.
“We have Bill Gates, who is sending all these mosquito nets into, let us say Malawi, for instance, which is great. But it is not the right investment because what he is doing is putting the guy in Malawi, who is making the mosquito nets right out of business, because you can’t beat something that is for free.
“And we have these advertisements; you see them all over [the world], like ‘Incredible India’—you never see ‘Astonishing Africa’ or ‘Amazing Africa’, you don’t see that.”
Conor McCreedy hopes to change all of this with his blue brush strokes.

Restyling Africa’s Image  One Brush Stroke At A Time

With their short hair, casual style and youthful faces, sisters Beatrice and Delphinah look strikingly similar.
“Lauretta is in South Africa, studying computer games,” Beatrice explains her absence as the two sisters sit down to coffee on the beach on a Sunday afternoon.
Despite the fact that Angolan women’s magazines Caras and Caju have designated them as one of Angola’s most influential fashion labels, they make an unassuming, almost shy, first impression.
Beatrice, Delphinah and Lauretta grew up in Botswana and Namibia. Beatrice studied interior design in Cape Town, Delphinah studied economics in Namibia.
Sometime in 2001, Delphinah made a skirt that changed her life and that of her sisters.
“My fellow students really liked that skirt, so I started making denim ones for them. That same year, we launched our own label, GSquare. We even created our own model agency, with 30 male and female models,” she says.
“In the beginning it was just the two of us,” Beatrice says, “but we were soon joined by one of Delphinah’s friends. I designed and made men’s clothes, Delphinah women’s clothes. The men’s label was put on hold, but we’ll relaunch it next year.”
In 2001, GSquare won the Young Entrepreneurs Prize at the Namibian Entrepreneurs Competition. Soon afterwards, Delphinah’s friend quit.
“That’s when Delphinah, Lauretta and I launched our own label: Geraldo Fashions. It is named after our late father, who was an artist, painter and carpenter,” says Beatrice.
“We’ve now got American, German, South African and Namibian clients,” Delphinah says, “as well as Angolan celebrities.”
TV presenter and model Vania Vilèla, for instance, is the current ‘face’ of Geraldo Fashions. So are singer and Big Brother Africa reality TV star Tatiana Durao, Big Brother Africa star and Channel O presenter Weza Silva, and Angolan top model Karina Silva.
International fashion shows form an integral part of the Geraldo sisters’ business. In 2002, the Geraldo sisters participated in the Pan African Fashion Show. That same year, they were elected Best Young Namibian Designers by an international judging panel at the fashion show, Sense of Africa.
Three years after Beatrice and Delphinah moved back to Angola, their label participated in the seventh edition of the Angola Fashion Week in 2008. Geraldo Fashions was also represented at the Angola Fashion Week in 2009, 2010 and 2011. In October 2011, Geraldo Fashions participated in Luanda’s second edition of Fashion Business Angola.
“That’s the biggest fashion event in Africa, with 26 international and nine Angolan designers,” says Beatrice.
There are other high-profile events scheduled for 2012: the Swahili Fashion Week, Cape Town Fashion Week, and Mozambique Fashion Week. The Geraldo sisters also hope to participate in the next Africa Fashion Week.
Geraldo Fashions is still small. Its current annual turnover is a little less than $70,000, compared to $10,000 in the first five years of its existence. So far, neither economic crises nor Chinese or Angolan competition have got in the way.
“We’re too small for recessions to have a significant impact,” Beatrice says, “but we do compete against Angolan boutiques, which often sell very nice Brazilian and European labels.”
Beatrice, Delphinah and Lauretta have funded their entire business themselves. They started their fashion career with one manual sewing machine.
“We only bought our first electrical machines after our first official show, which left us with many new clients. Now that we’re successful, we still make all our clothes ourselves, at home. Our brand is very exclusive, and all our work is based on private orders,” says Beatrice.
The sisters buy most of their fabrics in South Africa, Namibia, Portugal and France. Silk and chiffon are among their favorites, as are feathers, fur and laces. Daring, detailed tailoring, with a wide array of colors, mark their designs.
Those who want to wear Geraldo Fashions’ exclusive designs and materials have to place a personal order. The label is no longer sold at Cape Town designer boutiques Second Time Around and Loulou Store, but the sisters are currently trying to open their own shop in Luanda instead. Their fashion items don’t come cheap.
“But they are affordable by Angolan standards,” Beatrice says. “A dress will cost you between $350 and $700.”
The sisters’ ambitions don’t stop here. Future plans include Geraldo Fashions shops in Namibia, South Africa and outside Africa, and an accessory line with jewelry and shoes.
Geraldo Fashions seems to have been born at the right time. “Our fashion has a modern African feel, for which there is an increasing demand. We see more and more people wearing national designers at events, parties, clubs and restaurants, and also in African magazines. Four or five years ago, Angolan labels were almost non-existent in people’s daily lives,” says Beatrice.

Fashionista Sistas!

As Precious Moloi-Motsepe walks into the restaurant at the plush Michelangelo Towers, in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg, she smiles sweetly while making her way to the table. The waiters are on their marks, but she signals kindly with her eyes that she’s fine—a down-to-earth lady in a peach power suit.
<div id="attachment_283" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-283" class="size-medium wp-image-283" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_1557-1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Dr Precious Moloi &#8211; Motsepe, chairperson of the African Fashion Week held in Sandton</div>
She chuckles as she says many people ask how she switched from medicine to fashion. A doctor specializing in women’s health, she left her practice to chair a company organizing fashion week shows.
It is merely one leg of a long journey. One of five children, Moloi-Motsepe was born and raised in Soweto, south of Johannesburg; she went to a Catholic school in Rustenburg before studying medicine at Wits University in Johannesburg. This was followed by postgraduate studies in human and reproductive health at the University of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town.
The switch to fashion came after she stopped working to have a baby.  At the same time, her family foundation was being established, which contributes largely to education, health and economic opportunities for young people. The foundation was offered a fashion company in Cape Town and Moloi-Motsepe says she soon realised an opportunity was presenting itself in the clothing and textile business—an industry that employs many women.
As Moloi-Motsepe had worked in women’s health, this was another opportunity to help women help themselves economically. This heralded the birth of Africa Fashion International (AFI).
“I covered a lot; seeing fashion weeks and the impact they have on the economy of countries. You have media traveling from all over the world going there, you have buyers moving from all over the world to go there—you know it just stimulates growth,” Moloi-Motsepe says.
Africa Fashion Week, held at the Sandton Convention Centre from October 20 to 22 this year, proved to be the biggest yet with more than 20,000 visitors attending the event, as well as the Africa Fashion Trade Expo.
“Fashion in Africa is going places; we have an advantage of a growing population—a billion people on the continent. That’s a big number. The important thing is it should be consumers who are able to buy,” says Moloi-Motsepe.
The good doctor believes there is potential, but admits there are problems along the way, like a shortage of capital, an abundance of cheap imports and poor distribution.
“Cheap imports make it difficult for local designers to compete in the market because our input costs are very high compared to China,” she says.
“I think the best way for us is not to get stuck in competing at that level. Our focus should be on the high design, high quality, high value-added products—I think that will help to maintain sustainability of our industry.”
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Tea with the Queen of Fashion

Not so long ago, fashion design in Africa went something like this: A tailor sets up shop in the back room of his house; he services the needs of the community’s elite; in between making wedding dresses for local girls and three-piece matric dance suits for the boys, he’s known as the go-to person should your hemline need a bit of adjustment.
Ten years ago, this was fashion designer David Tlale’s reality as he sat alone by the sewing machine in his mother’s house in the township of Vosloorus, in the East Rand of Johannesburg, South Africa, drawing sketches and making patterns. Nowadays, it is these designs that have helped change the face of fashion in South Africa and the continent.
<div id="attachment_280" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-280" class="size-medium wp-image-280" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/299-35_01_1-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Fashion designer David Tlale at his Sandton store; Johannesburg, 1 November 2011 &#8211; Photo by Brett Eloff.</div>
As Tlale and I sit in the lounge of the upmarket Fire &amp; Ice! hotel in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, for sundowners, it is crystal clear that his vision is far from being a mere pipedream. In the nine years that he has been a professional fashion designer, he has won many awards and accolades; he has become arguably the most famous and recognizable black designer in South Africa with a list of endorsements.
And on the topic of endorsement, his current collaboration with the South African Mint is the talk of the town, owing to reports that the Mint stopped producing money on the day they hosted his fashion show at their Centurion premises during the recent Africa Fashion Week, in October.
So how did he get the money-making machine to come on board with him?
“SA Mint got in contact with me after they attended the fashion show that I held on the Mandela Bridge in May 2011 (the bridge was also closed for this show). They had been supporting a few campaigns on climate change—the awareness and fundraising for it, so they wanted me to bring a fashion element, like an artistic interpretation of the dangers and effects of climate change,” he says.
The Mint had a special coin, worth more than $1,000, struck in his honour for his contribution to the cause.
The Mint was not the only customer. Luxury car manufacturer Volvo also selected Tlale as one of three South African designers—along with Nkhensani Nkosi of Stoned Cherrie and Gert-Johan Coetzee—to help design its cars.
But his biggest coup so far has been Estée Lauder’s Clinique range, for which he designed a limited edition handbag. This resulted in David Tlale branding being splashed across malls and department stores all over South Africa and beyond.
In September 2011, Tlale took a major plunge by opening a store at the high-end Michelangelo Towers in Africa’s economic hub—the mall of Sandton City. Now, at a time of recession when other established designers are selling into major parent companies, mainly for security, this move has raised the proverbial eyebrow among many a fashion and retail expert.
“Three years ago, Woolworths came to me and offered to take my brand on to distribute through their stores. Now after working for so many years to make sure that consumers understood my identity and aesthetic, I decided to decline this offer because I felt that they wanted to wash away much of the detail that makes a David Tlale creation. They wanted to dilute my signature basically, so I decided to wait it out until I felt that my brand was ready to stand on its own two feet in the world of retail,” he says confidently.
Tlale is also known to be open and honest about having faced extreme highs and lows in his journey to becoming a fashion businessman.
“I have seen it all,” he says. “I have gone through times where the business overheads were way more than what was coming in; I have even gone through a time when I thought I needed to get a nine-to-five job to finance the costs of running the label. But that was part of the journey that every entrepreneur goes through.
“People criticize and slate me for choosing the Michelangelo Towers to house the store, but I personally believe that the brand David Tlale calls for an address like that and nothing else. We are a luxury brand and we have to be where all the other luxury brands are, and where the tourists and the moneyed set hang out. And the label is ready,” he adds.
While it remains to be seen just how well the store at the Towers does, over at The Bromwell boutique hotel in Cape Town, where Tlale’s wares are also sold, things appear to be going swimmingly.
“I was so amazed by how well our merchandise is moving at The Bromwell. At this point, customers are calling for us to open a David Tlale branch over in Cape Town, so what I am working on right now—while I watch the progress at my Johannesburg store—is to expand within The Bromwell,” he states.
With prices at the store ranging from anything between R1,200 ($150) for a blouse to R8,000 ($1,000) for an evening dress, how does Tlale handle the general perception that one has to pay a fortune to afford a David Tlale piece, and does that hurt his business in any way?
“I get a lot of that kind of reaction. People generally think that it takes a right arm, a leg and a kidney to afford one of my garments, and that’s not necessarily true,” he says.
Tlale’s deep-pocketed clientele pay more than R25,000 ($3,150) for a custom-made couture piece.
I ask whether Tlale has male clients who allow him to put them in dresses, like he does the male models who walk the ramp for his fashion shows.
“My inspiration for putting men in dresses stems from the eastern culture that I totally embrace. And as a point of correction, those garments people see as ‘dresses’ are actually long kaftans. As an artist, I love pushing the boundaries and reminding people that fashion is art, it’s fantasy, and I do not believe in doing a show that will not give people something to talk about when they leave. I use my shows to tell a story, to give people an experience and to give the media something to chew on,” he says.
As one of the most publicized fashion designers in Africa, it would seem that the media and the press appear mesmerized by Tlale. The reports aren’t always rosy; there is talk of tardiness and “diva tendencies”.
“The problem here is that I am always the last designer to close off a season of Fashion Week. And what normally happens is that everyone before me is already running late, so by the time I’m supposed to come on and wrap things up, it’s glaringly obvious that everything is running two hours late and I get the flak for all of it,” he explains.
Whether or not you subscribe to Tlale’s over-the-top bling aesthetic and price tag, there’s no denying that he has indeed come a long way from the dusty streets of “Voslo”, and is inching closer to realising his dream of changing the face of fashion in Africa.
The David Tlale label is making waves at the respective fashion weeks in Angola, Nigeria, Ghana and Mozambique—the rest of the continent awaits to be conquered.
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Tag: Art

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