Thebe Magugu Serves Nostalgia at Paris Fashion Week
Thebe Magugu has SA fashion enthusiasts collectively reminiscing with his nostalgic spring/summer 2022 collection, Genealogy. The fashion icon in the making launched a vintage-inspired collection refashioned from a gallery of family photos and presented it in the most sentimental way for Paris Fashion Week..
Instead of the average runway show, Thebe showcased his clothes by screening a roundtable discussion with himself, his mother and aunt going through photographs of their family dating back to the 1950s. Each outfit from the photos is re-edited into a piece that emphasises and celebrates the sophisticated style embodied by his family in their youth.
“There were so many [photographs],” he says in a Vogue UK interview. “… I went back home and started looking around, going through these photos… that joy that I felt. I wanted to explore this feeling even more and try and show it to other people. [I wanted to] showcase that I draw a lot of my inspiration, optimism and joy from my family. It was a natural choice for it to be the official inspiration for the spring/summer 2022 collection. There was such an ease to it because it’s what I know, it’s what I grew up with, so it was very fun reinterpreting it and transcribing it, putting it into an aesthetic.”
As his family members discuss the significance of each photo and the details of their outfits, Thebe asks questions and relates his interest, sometimes with insertions of his fashion knowledge. Certainly, many will appreciate and recognise the soothing effect that comes with going through a box of old photos with loved ones. This presentation of his work is wholesome, familiar and can be seen as a desire to break away from the excessive noise (social media photo challenges, memes, etc) and information overload (negative news) that comes from a digitally-focused world.
Thebe, however, expresses that Genealogy was formed to break from all of the social turmoil that occurred in South Africa this year. “In South Africa, there were political upheavals, social upheavals, it was such an ugly time and I felt like it was getting to me in a lot of ways. I knew that the one thing that always gets me out of a dark cloud is [looking to the past],” he says.
Watch the roundtable discussion and the presentation of his collection in the video below.