The bright yellow of a shirt with a triangle design catches the eye, next to it is a dark pair of denim shorts that act as a foil and complement to the shirt.
This clothing is a glimpse of what 29-year-old sustainable fashion designer Katekani Moreku has created as part of the Futurewear initiative by Pick n Pay Clothing.
The lad from Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, was tasked to design a collection that would showcase South Africa’s united heritage.
“I source my inspiration from my Sepulana culture, [however] I wanted to present culture to everybody else in a very different way. I didn’t want to have you look at my collection and see a tribal collection. I wanted to push it a little bit forward."
"Although the colours are sourced from the Sepulana culture, we use a lot of bright colours a lot of the time, your yellows, pinks, blues."
The emerging designer, who started off by studying electrical engineering, sparked the interest of designer Gavin Rajah, when for his last year of fashion design at the Durban University of Technology, Moreku incorporated maize meal packets into his clothing. He did this by fusing the packets with different scraps of materials and wowed the fashion circles with his ingenuity.
Moreku admits in the beginning he wasn’t sure what sustainable fashion even meant. He was convinced at the time that it had something "to do with hippies and wearing 100% cotton garments". But he soon realised that sustainability is something he is familiar with.
“Sustainable fashion came as an idea when I was doing my research of Sepulana culture. When I dug deeper into it, I realised that everything they (Pulana people) do is quite sustainable.
"The thing that stood out the most was that during cultural celebrations, the women would go look for old clothing and old plastic bags because they could not afford new things. They would take old things and create something new, like a costume for that day. I got my story from there.”
After his research, he says he started to recognise what he had [culturally] and started to appreciate who he was as a person and who his community was.
“I tried to represent the people within my work so that it can tell the story to everyone else.”
For Pick n Pay Clothing, the designer says he tried to work with as many natural materials as possible. His collection is a menswear range, which he says he tried to make as unisex as possible.
He showcased a collection at the 2017 Vodacom Durban July alongside nine established designers after winning a student competition. In the same year he was ranked among the best designers at the SA Fashion Week, and last year he was awarded the student award at the inaugural 2019 Twyg Sustainable Fashion Awards.
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