South African designer Sindiso Khumalo showcased her SS22 collection, Jagger, at Milan Fashion Week.
The Jagger collection pays homage to the treasured African history lost in a fire that ravaged the Jagger Reading Room and other facilities at the University of Cape Town in early 2021.
The Jagger Reading Room housed a significant African Studies Collection, which was started in 1953. This included 70 000 published monographs spanned the whole of sub-Saharan Africa and included national imprints from the entire continent as well as works published in Europe and North America.
The collections were especially strong in gender studies, media studies, HIV/AIDS issues and debates around the character of African studies as a discipline.
Sindiso Khumalo’s SS22 Jagger collection, “A homage to The University of Cape Town Jagger African studies Library”, features motifs that are tributes to the irreplaceable books, the maps and the political history and story of South African and African icons.
Khumalo, who launched her eponymous fashion brand in 2015, designs the textiles in her collections by hand with watercolours and collage. Her colourful aesthetic is inspired by her Zulu and Ndebele heritage.
In 2020 she made her Milan Fashion Week debut with a collection based on American abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Khumalo was also one of the joint finalists to share the €300,000 (R5.9million) LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2020 alongside London-based Priya Ahluwalia.
