The Radical Fashion History of South African Music

When Spoek Mathambo appeared on the cover of The Fader 16 years ago, it felt like the lifting of a veil, a chance to peek behind the lace curtain that shrouded post-apartheid South African identity. He looked dapper, dressed in mostly black, a white shirt buttoned to the very top peeking out from between the gold-and-black scarf that lined the edges of his black jacket. He wore square-framed glasses, the same ones hipsters swore by as part of their aesthetic arsenal.

That the rapper, producer and filmmaker graced the cover wasn't a coincidence. He'd been opining from the sidelines and the centre of South African rap and electronic music for the better part of the 2000s, and for the next couple of years he soundtracked the sonic and visual identities of many a publication — including OkayAfrica — which followed him in addition to the critical infrastructure and cultural capital of a Johannesburg that produced fellow acts like Dirty Paraffin and Big FKN Gun. For a moment, it felt like a whole scene that had been ignored by the mainstream South African media had found its place of embrace, a comfort zone that accommodated the breadth of its oddities.

As one half of Sweat.X alongside Markus Wormstorm, Mathambo was drawn to bright neon colours and tight pants — hipster core for millennials discovering their voices, mixing and matching tastes to see what sticks. He'd offset that with fedora hats and the darkest shades this side of blackness. It was cool, it was hip, it was unhinged, and it resonated with a specific demographic — one that didn't mind the radio, but didn't necessarily rely on it either for music discovery.

There was a shared thread — informed by geographical commonality, by international trends, by dysregulated conceptions of self — that was not so much codified as it was improvized. The BLK JKS, who'd had their own Fader cover moment two years earlier, were more punk-leaning, with a twist of pantsula cool. Drummer Tshepang Ramoba looked like he'd spent time growling in a heavy metal band, as opposed to living a parallel life as a deejay, digger, and curator of the finest strains of electronic music, especially those emerging north of Gauteng. Guitarists Linda Buthelezi and Mpumi Mcata were musical twins locked in dislocated rhythmic transmission, two sides of the same coin hellbent on injecting the blackness back into the rock and the roll of their inland guitar work, which borrowed from coastal legends like Madala Kunene, Mfaz'omnyama, Phuzekhemisi, and others. Bassist Molefi Makananise was the mellowest of the bunch, observing, not saying much, steady rocking the groove.

Yet while clothes-as-aesthetic informed and defined the alternative scenes, those artists didn't really put the drip into the music itself. The ones who did were moving in a different formation. Siyabonga Ngwekazi — Scoop Makhathini to the culture, a youth icon whose work on television and radio helped elevate many a scene and kickstart plenty of careers — remembers what BoyzNBucks, the collective that counted him and Okmalumkoolkat of Dirty Paraffin among its ranks, were doing as "very high level streetwear."

"We weren't Louis Vuitton, we weren't Gucci. Riky went that route, but we as BoyzNBucks were more into the street fashion — which still was very higher grade because you couldn't get those labels, you couldn't get those clothes unless you travelled outside of the country. It was when Riky then became an artist that changed people's perception."

Riky Rick mastered that perception change and made a career out of it. When he rapped, "Sidlukotini kwedini/ cava le jean kwedini/ cava le slumber boy/ sidl' ilast number boy" (we're cotton eaters, boy/ check out this jean, boy/ we're pushing the highest standard, boy) a decade ago, it was to establish rank, to set himself apart from the pack, to let anyone who cared to listen know that his style was the hardest.

By embracing high fashion and injecting lines about rocking Gucci into his raps, he opened a lane that many more would follow. He explained how he thought about clothing when I interviewed him during that period: "I try to explore different vibes, different feelings [according to] what setting I am in. Sometimes I just throw on stuff that I like, maybe it looks nice or whatever. But I always try to follow concepts, especially when it's important events."

He continued: "The whole journey for us started with sneakers. I grew up in Austria, and what happened was that there was a lot of emphasis on brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Timberlands. This is when I was like, Standard 3 (Grade 5). There was so much emphasis on that and Lacoste. These were brands that were big in Europe. I always aspired to be one of those kids who could afford that. But one thing my dad always made sure was that we always had a dope pair of sneakers.”

"When we came into rap, I'm getting opportunities to explore different parts of the world, exploring materials — that's why I use cotton as something that's important to me — and what it means to be comfortable in your skin beyond sneakers. Black people, our illest representation is of shoes. We look down the whole time — what shoe is this, what shoe is that. When I started travelling everywhere, shoes didn't mean that much. It's all about accessories, and then I got into that."

A collaboration between the rapper and Hugh Masekela had been in the pipeline, but never happened because the elder statesman of South African groove passed away. Some six months before that fateful day in January 2018, the two sat in conversation before an audience, in preparation for their collaboration at that year's Joy of Jazz festival. The conversation was wide-ranging, both artists expressing heartfelt admiration for the other's craft.

Said the musician: "Before Louis Armstrong and King Oliver and all those guys came on the scene, people used to dress shitty. These people came out of slavery and I think when they looked [at the fashion then] they said, 'shit, we ain't gonna dress like that.'

"Not only did they dress, they set the standard for dressing in the world. By the 1930s/'40s, everybody wanted to be an African-American, all over the world! I always say that if it wasn't for Louis Armstrong [and] all those people, we'd probably still be wearing white-powdered wigs and those buckled shoes that George Washington used to wear."

Masekela credited Armstrong and the other figures who became influential in Black America during the twentieth century with changing how the world lives: its very fabric, from how we walk to how we cook what we eat, essentially.

"Usually when people talk about jazz, they just talk about the musicians. But that first group of people [who] came out of New Orleans actually civilised the world. And out of that came all the genres. If it wasn't for them, you wouldn't be Mr. Kotini," he said.

That influence became a confluence that extended to Sophiatown, where jazz and Black life under apartheid produced a vibrant culture that was, in itself, a form of resistance. In Blame Me on History, Bloke Modisane paints life just before the forced removals that split neighbours apart and displaced families. He writes about one of the figures who inhabited it, Lelinka, a "knife-happy rough-house brother" and member of the Americans gang — "Sophiatown's best-dressed boys, whose fashions are straight out of the pages of Esquire."

The style did not die but multiplied when bulldozers came to Sophiatown. It boarded removal trucks and lodged itself in new places, like Soweto, and mutated in old ones, like Alexandra. The Florsheim gave way to the Converse All-Star, and pantsulas diversified their dress code to include two-piece khaki suits and bucket hats. This aesthetic, carried through the townships during the seventies and eighties, became the uniform of liberation when kwaito swept the same look into Mandela's rainbow nation. Groups like Alaska and Trompies had the Dickies combos on lock, while Kabelo Mabalane's solo career took off when he declared himself a "pantsula for life!"

Every generation dresses against something: jazz cats against the Pass Laws, pantsulas against the tightening grip of apartheid in the ‘70s and ‘80s, which became a celebration of new-found freedom in the ‘90s.  Towards the end of the 2000s, the post-liberation clarity was starting to settle in, and cracks in the machine of freedom started appearing everywhere, all at once. The emphasis on punk and queer aesthetics took front stage; people were disenfranchized, and the world had gone into a financial meltdown. Riky Rick dressed against the poverty of imagination that said a kid from the hood couldn't speak Gucci fluently. But it took the queer children of gqom to identify the last remaining dress code and break it: the one the township itself enforces.

FAKA did what Masekela said about Armstrong’s generation: looking at the available image and saying, we ain't gonna dress like that. The duo of Fela Gucci and Desire Marea — all pearls, heels, mesh, and bare skin over the gqom configurations of Durban’s coastal expanse — zapped compulsory masculinity that ran through every fibre of the music and queered the framework. They took Ricky Rick’s flashiness, the BLK JKS’ confrontational stance, the pop and the neon glow of electronic sounds and retro-fitted it into an Anna Wintour-approved catharsis of music and high fashion. And the world came calling again, the same way it had come for Spoek Matambo and the BLK JKS. This time, however, Versace were on the other side of the line, and the duo was soon soundtracking a Milan runway with their music. 

“Clothes are just important. They can actualise their identity. They are powerful. I love fashion; I actually studied fashion for a little bit, I had dreams of becoming a fashion designer,” said Marea during an interview.