History lives on in Thebe Magugu’s SS24 Collection titled ‘EXOTICS’.

Thebe Magugu is a  contemporary fashion designer based in Johannesburg,

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South Africa. After moving to Johannesburg from a small town named Kimberly, he studied fashion design, fashion photography, and fashion media and graduated from LISOF, allowing him to enter the world of fashion with a multi-disciplinary approach. 

His label - named after himself, THEBE MAGUGU, began in 2016, a brand that primarily focuses on women’s ready wear. By 2019, Magugu had received the LVMH prize and won the British Fashions Council’s International Fashion Showcase for curation and fashion content. 

 Magugu aims to constantly present women with clothing that not only complies with the everyday, but ‘enhances’ it. Futuristic patterns and sleek forward looking intersects with notes of  Africa’s rich and vast and versatile heritage, making Magugus’s brand one that represents a vast array of women.

Magugu zeroes in on a story from African History that faces the risk of being forgotten, and for his SS24 Collection titled ‘EXOTICS’, he explores cloth through the lens of the life of Sarah Baartman - one of the first women known to be subject to human trafficking in the early 19th Century. It is one of the most distressing stories of the colonial period, and Magugu handles it perfectly through his craftsmanship and eye for design. “For those unfamiliar with the story of Sarah Baartman, she was a girl taken from her indigenous village in the Eastern Cape by two white British men in 1810’, explains Magugu, ‘who took her to London and exploited her to the very end of her life.”

Among the high collars and button down T-shirts that appear in this collection as references to Victorian style, one of the pieces from this collection that stands out is a black collared and belted belted dress with pink roses embellished across the whole dress, and an undercoat of pink silk, detailed with an intricate design of flowers that falls out from underneath the black coat. This piece was paired with black heeled boots that are seen throughout the collection. The repeated references to roses against black fabric repeats itself across the collection, suggesting a theme of darkness that was so abundant in the colonial period, and the roses speak to Baartman standing out significantly, her differences making her a target. 

In this collection, it’s evident that extreme consideration by Magugu himself was taken into working out how to design a collection that will have its own lifespan that lives outside of its appeal on the runway.

 Another piece that stands out in this collection is a black cropped shirt which was paired with a long skirt that has a pink printed map all over it - portraying the tragic  journey that Baartman took from her homeland in South Africa, to the foreign and industrial land of England. Magugu wanted to shed light on this tragic piece of history, in the hopes that it won’t get lost in human memory. And it’s certain that this collection will be used as an example later on of how to honour those who came before us, with the modernised consumer in mind. 

Speaking to Sarah’s heritage, Magugu ensures that vibrant colour palettes are used all throughout this collection. Vivid hues speak to the fact that there is a new story being told with these garments, and although these pieces represent a part of history, Magugu adapts to this age by giving this collection a modern twist, making the pieces transferable and ones that could be worn in this day and age.  Johannesburg based illustrator, Pathu Membwilwi, worked with Magugu on one of the pieces, a silk made, floor-length dress, which showcased an illustration of Sarah Baartman. Just as Baartman herself was exploited and had her body degraded and dispersed for trafficking,the  illustration that covers the skirt itself is broken into segments that lie across the garment . Of the piece, Magugu says, ‘Symbolically it speaks to that sort of fragmentation of being dropped into a completely sort of foreign place’ It also speaks to a physical type of fragmentation as well, alluding to the exploitation of Baartman, and how she was turned into a source of entertainment. 

Although Magugu has already put his message forward in the fashion industry, it’s clear by his current impact that he is going to be a pioneer of changing the narrative of fashion that emerges from Africa, and he is definitely a designer to watch out for, whatever his next move may be.