[Insert Fashion Here] | #2, 2020 | Much news, many updates

Good afternoon, good people!

This is meant to be a morning read, but if you're in GMT+2 (and most of you are), it's arrived just in time for you to productively procrastinate until the clock strikes 5 on a Friday afternoon, and that is a good thing. We'll overlook that it's a week late because I procrastinated, chased the rumour mill re: Raf to Prada and Jacquemus to Gaultier and came up empty, and then had to update links and stories while dealing with work officially taking off for the year, yes? Yes. Love that we're on the same page about this.

Ian Moir is out (sort of) and Roy Bagattini is in as Woolworths Group CEO

Ian has presided over some incredibly tough retail conditions in recent years and done — in my observant but inexperienced opinion — a generally good job of steering Woolies through them, all things considered. However, there can be no mincing of words about David Jones: that purchase did not go well, but in the wise words of some random person who went viral, it really do be like that sometimes.

Moir is staying on to lead the David Jones group's turnaround efforts. Bagattini, a South African, is joining Woolies from Levi's USA's senior executive suite. I have no takes or predictions to offer, I just want to see how this goes. Roy starts on the 17th. I wonder if he's missed home. Official announcement on Bizcommunity.
[Photo: public press photo, Levi's]

SA Designers at MBFW Berlin

Rich Mnisi, Viviers, Floyd Avenue, and Clive Rundle put on quite the opening show at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in Berlin this month. We saw minimally engineered denim from Floyd Avenue, dense volume and innovative textile from Clive Rundle, a colour & print explosion in Rich Mnisi, and mixed media art-as-fashion from Viviers. Also, Candice Swanepoel was there! Hoe gan it, hartjie?!
[Photo: @TheFashionAgent on Instagram]

Here's a bunch of recent news & good reads
from, well, everywhere.

• RIP Opening Ceremony - BoF

• Glenda Bailey Steps Down as Editor-in-Chief of Harper's Bazaar - BoF

• Katie Grand Names Ben Cobb Co-Editor-in-Chief of LOVE - BoF

• Why Balenciaga sees opportunity in couture - Vogue Business

• Buzz builds around made-to-order fashion manufacturing - Vogue Business

• Amazon isn't doing enough to combat counterfeit goods for LVMH to get on board - Glossy.co

• Lukhanyo Mdingi & Reign have been chosen for the Ethical Fashion Initiative's accelerator programme - Twyg

• 7 Top Trends from Pre-Fall collections - Fashionista.com

• Jeremy Scott (among others) is leaving New York Fashion Week for Paris - Fashionista.com

And here's where, with decreasing awkwardness,
I slip in my own recent work.

• My first full feature for Vogue Arabia! The State Of Cultural Appropriation & Why It Needs To Change. I previously (and VERY excitedly) wrote up an announcement for them of Thebe's LVMH Prize win.

• The first of my new monthly columns on sustainability in fashion for Twyg magazine: Line of sight: Why the future of fashion is about perspective. Thank you Jackie! Very excited to learn and share with this column.

Fashion is back on TV and I am, in a word, hype.

It didn't ever leave, really. I'm just excited for the Tan-Alexa dynamic on Next In Fashion, now streaming on Netflix. Also excited for guest appearances like Eva Chen's, because I LOVE EVA. Not on Netflix? They put some of the first episode on YouTube. [Also excited the Bold Type is back, because I miss fashion fiction — long live Ugly Betty et al.]
[Photo: @Nextinfashion on Instagram]

We're making exciting strides in
plant-based leather

Behind door #1, the natural, biodegradable, and fully circular bio-engineered textile Mirum, made by Nature Fibre Welding Inc. Behind door #2 is Desserto, a partially biodegradable cactus leather developed by brothers in Mexico. I think we are finally approaching a scalable category volume that could drive prices down, drive adoption up, and normalise plant-based animal-imitation textiles for good. Yay!
[Photo: @ecoage on Instagram]

Aaand that's all. Take a deep breath, because here comes another fashion month. The NYFW exits are already making it interesting, but what's more interesting is the questions we are finally asking about the model itself. Toronto Fashion Week has been cancelled, following Stockholm tapping out last year, and Copenhagen Fashion Week is taking the exciting approach of setting hefty sustainability targets for itself and all showing designers, giving them 3 years to get compliant if they still want to be part of the platform. The timing may be a response to recent criticism of the effectiveness of Global Fashion Agenda's Copenhagen Fashion Summit, a thought leadership event for which guests fly in from all over the world, that is largely focused on sustainability solutions.

At home, our fashion week issues live on a different plane. Designers in our small but highly fragmented market have different platform needs and requirements but the way we've split it up, the model's basic scale is incompatible with the size and spending capacity of designers, buyers, and customers. But over the past couple of years, I've switched to solution-mode regarding African fashion. All the things that make us feel behind the curve can be an advantage in the new world order if we let them. Africa is a blank canvas for solving global fashion's problems! All we have to do is innovate solutions using models that keep money and agency on the continent... but that's a discussion for a different day, and maybe a different platform. Share this with a friend you think would like it, and have a good weekend!