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Midwest Fashion Week stages CONNEXIONS in Johannesburg – A First for South Africa

MyPR: Midwest Fashion Week stages CONNEXIONS in Johannesburg – A First for South Africa:

Midwest Fashion Week Photo: Connextions

Midwest Fashion Week announced its upcoming CONNEXIONS fashion event online last week with a virtual media event. Midwest Fashion Week is dedicated to empowering creativity and the expression of individuality and has created this new platform to allow designers from South Africa and the diaspora to showcase their brands.
CONNEXIONS was launched to global lifestyle and fashion media, at a virtual event hosted by Jen Su, style and entertainment reporter who is now U.S. based. The inaugural event, CONNEXIONS is inspired by the founder of Midwest Fashion Week and fashion designer for Catou, Berny Martin. Midwest fashion Week’s emphasis is on empowering creativity through a strong, supportive fashion community. The CONNEXIONS initiative seeks to grow the already established fashion community beyond the Midwest and open up markets for designers based in other parts of the world through a series of regional events.
“I am encouraged by how we can work together to make new connections.

This inspiration was ignited by my trips to South Africa and how the culture there can be an asset to this region in the USA. Fashion is becoming more and more the found source of global economic development and South Africa has a lot of potential,” says Berny Martin, founder of Midwest Fashion Week.

It was announced at the launch that the CONNEXIONS event will take place in Johannesburg on the 25th of September, and will be hosted by Lionel Moise, ABC News Anchor & Emmy Award Winning Journalist. Moise will travel to South Africa to host this curated event featuring some of South Africa’s best creative designers. The date was carefully selected to coincide with Heritage Day in South Africa.

“This is a first for South Africa as this event will be bespoke and focused on a small group of designers across product lines alongside art. The designers will get a chance to bring their brand vision to life outside of the conventional runway presentation,” says Odysseus Shirindza who is the curator for the event.

The showcase will be hosted at Gallery MOMO, a premium art gallery space in Parktown North, Johannesburg. The showcase will be curated with art, speaking to the concept of CONNEXIONS, and showcasing artists from South Africa and the diaspora. Participating designers will be allocated a space to creatively display their signature designs in the form of a static installation, as well as live models. The day will culminate in a spectacular live fashion show highlighting the collections of each of the participating designers.

Due to Covid-19 regulations, the event will be accessible to a select few at the venue, by invitation only, with a virtual component to allow for a broader audience to tune in at a later date.

“The objective of the CONNEXIONS showcase is to facilitate new dialogue between the Midwest region of the U.S. with South Africa. I am hopeful that the new dialogue will spark conversations around economic development and growth between the two regions in the mix of the new global economic developments,” adds Martin.

Some of the confirmed designers include; Berny Martin – Catou, Odysseus Shirindza – Arnreuby, Reggie Xaba – Ifele, Nokwanda Ngcobo – 8thWandah, Heather Marie Designs, Inga Gubeka – Inga Atelier. More designers will be revealed leading up to the event

“The event’s ultimate goal is to provide a platform for those interested in different aspects of design to interact with designers. We would like to see fashion and art enthusiasts from all spectrums attend the show,” concludes Shirindza.

#MFWCONNEXIONS_JHB

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Have you tried: Travelling to South Africa?

Did you know this about Johannesburg? In 1964 the Johannesburg Botanical Garden was established in the suburb of Emmarentia. The Emmarentia Dam forms part of the Garden. The Garden is best known for its roses.

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The Randlord Mansions: History

The history of these mansions is also a story of urban warfare and preservation. In the 1960s and 70s, as Johannesburg expanded, many of the original Parktown estates were ruthlessly demolished to make way for the M1 Highway and the massive concrete campus of the Wits University Medical School. The “Parktown War” saw heritage activists fighting the bulldozers to save what remained of the city’s architectural soul. Today, several of the surviving mansions serve as corporate headquarters, schools, or museums, stripped of their private domesticity but preserved as monuments to a gilded age.

Interestingly, these mansions also played a secret role in the city’s political evolution. It was in the drawing rooms of Parktown that the “progressive” mining elite would meet to discuss the future of the country, often finding themselves at odds with the more conservative Boer government. Lady Florence Phillips, in particular, used her influence to found the Johannesburg Art Gallery, insisting that a world-class city needed world-class culture, not just gold bars. Today, walking the “Heritage Trail” through Parktown offers a haunting contrast; you stand in the quiet, manicured gardens of the victors, looking down at the pulsing, crowded city that their gold mines created. It is the ultimate “view from the top,” a reminder that the extreme wealth of Sandton today has its DNA rooted in the stone-and-timber palaces of the 1900s.