Africanising hybridity? Toward an Afropolitan aesthetic in contemporary South African fashion design

Setting out from the assumption that South African fashion designers and their garments are noteworthy, yet underexplored, agents of socio-cultural change in post-1994 South Africa, this article will show that despite being untapped, the field of fashion and its propagators is firmly interwoven into the social and economic fabric of post-apartheid South Africa. It seems to be the case that South African fashion design is beginning to contribute to the reorganisation of socio-cultural and economic life in this country, by foregrounding South Africa's contemporary cultural heterogeneity, effectively marketing a range of creatively 'African' fashion garments, and enhancing the market-oriented and socio-cultural positions of fashion design and propagators thereof in local and global fashion markets. In what follows I point out key aspects of how this is taking place. Significantly, for the purposes of this themed issue, fashion and fashion design in South Africa are seen here as 'constructed from a range of disparate but at all times culturally-conditioned elements, or as a series of assertions suggesting that economic and organizational life is at present more culturallydetermined than it appeared to be in the past' (see Narunsky-Laden 2008: 139), and as such they endorse a cultural economic approach to local fashion design and the economic dynamics thereof.