The inaugural Brics Fashion Summit was hosted in Mzansi in 2018. Russia has hosted the summit in recent years.
Deputy Director for Design in the National department of Sport, Arts and Culture, Vusi Ngobeni, would like to see the return of the Brics Fashion Summit to South Africa.
“We started this Fashion Summit in 2018 when we hosted the Brics Summit and it was an idea that stemmed out of the department to say… let’s bring the fashion designers, fashion influencers from other countries,” Ngobeni told The Citizen while in Russia.
The inaugural Brics Fashion Summit was hosted in Mzansi in 2018, coinciding with South Africa’s hosting of the 10th edition of the Brics Summit in Sandton that year.
Fashion designers from Brazil, India and Russia attended the first Brics Fashion Summit in 2018.
Ngobeni sat down with The Citizen after the Brics+ Fashion Summit wrapped up in Moscow earlier this week.
This recent summit also invited countries from outside of Brics, including Tanzania, Namibia and the US.
The talks at the summit ranged from brand positioning to the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact of fashion on sustainability.
Selling South Africa to the world
The soft-spoken Ngobeni was part of the South African delegation at the summit, where they spoke about the country’s place in the fashion world.
Other Mzansi delegates included lecturer in the department of Fashion Design in the Faculty of Art, Design, and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), Tinyiko Baloyi.
Renowned designer David Tlale was also part of the discussions, as was the founder and CEO of the Soweto Fashion Week, Stephen Manzini, Cape Town College of Fashion Design, Director Gregg Maragelis, with GQ magazine’s editor in chief Molefe Kumona as the moderator.
Some of the topics touched on in the session were mutual integration: understanding consumer behaviour, logistical and regulatory considerations for entering the market, finding the right partners, and the potential for sourcing and collaborating with local talent.
Ngobeni said it was important to sell and promote the country in such summits.
“You sell a country through cultural tourism, it’s more of cultural diplomacy where we sell it through anything and everything. For us if you think about it, we are warm people, we are welcoming,” he said.
“It’s easy for us to sell that. In this important summit, we’ve got more mutual agreements, more common stuff that we can work on. If you look at the exhibition just outside here, you look at the cultures, you look at the bead work that has been showcased, you can see that in fact, there are a lot of similarities in what we do.”
Strengthening relations
Ngobeni said Minister Gayton McKenzie had a plan to strengthen international relations.
“Strengthening our relations with firstly Brics, SADC countries, Nepad and making sure we strengthen those relations. It was agenda number two or three,” shared the deputy director for design in the national department.
“It’s an agenda which, if you think about where we come from as a department, we had a lot of things that we did with, when Minister Nathi Mthethwa, he had an African agenda where the department had what we call Africa month. We tried to encourage relations within Africa where we make trade relations within ourselves which was quite important. I think over the years it has died down,” said Ngobeni.
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