Johannesburg - Inner city addresses in Joburg have become coveted, but if it’s a fashion designer’s studio your expectations aren’t high. You anticipate dirty factory floors littered with the detritus of clothing manufacturing; fabric off-cuts and balls of thread that dance around the room like tumbleweed in a deserted western town.
Shaldon Kopman’s studio is the antithesis; it is located in a quaint old building on Loveday Street, above Walter Benjamin, purveyors of the best quality imported textiles. It is inviting, clean, gentrified offices behind frosted glass fronts.
The setting is ideal; edgy but polished have become the catchphrases for Kopman’s Naked Ape label, which first debuted at SA Fashion Week in 2010. The label has grown steadily – it has been well-received on runways here and in New York – particularly when he started to infuse a street vernacular into his tailored menswear.
“We cater for a street-savvy gentleman who has his feet firmly on the ground, he frequents the downtown scenario but works as a chief executive in a firm. His is cool and understanding,” observes Kopman, who seems to epitomise his ideal client. A former model, he wears his clothing well and seems so relaxed given he is caught up in such a frenetic trade and a business that could “close from month to month”. It could be the reggae music playing in his office that facilitates this tranquil façade. The herbal tea. Or a quietly evolving confidence that comes from riding the top of a new wave of locally designed menswear. It might also be down to approaching the fashion business from all sides – the ramp, fashion show production, styling, before taking the plunge into the high-risk design and clothing production business.
His studio is buzzing with activity; tailors and assistants are traversing back and forth clutching half-finished garments that will no doubt evolve into what has become Naked Ape’s distinctive menswear; high quality, detailed luxury garments, often with a design twist. A jacket Kopman pulls from a rail in his office epitomises this; it is cut like a traditional men’s jacket but it boasts an original African bead print – strands of beads photographed in lines and repeated to appear like a check pattern. He’s clearly proud as he dangles it in front of me. It’s immaculately made, as is every garment here that I study, and the concept behind the print is ingenious – how the African-chic trend should have always been translated. Instead, in the early noughties when the post-apartheid identity crisis took hold, everyone jumped on the Shwe-shwe bandwagon until the wheels fell off, leaving Afrochic progenitors – Stoned Cherrie, Amanda Laird Cherry – high and dry.
Kopman was in the fashion scene then, working as a stylist for the glossies.
“Everyone was scatterbrained, searching for this identity. Everyone was on this high, trying lots of different things but we didn’t know what our space was about. We were confined to certain areas. We were adapting to the new society, we needed to integrate first. Even now we haven’t had enough time to get to know one another better as South Africans,” observes the designer, sitting behind his desk with a cup of herbal tea in hand. He often succumbs to philosophising about our society during the hour or so that I spend with him; it’s what comes from being a keen observer of it – an overlooked aspect of the design process.
In some ways his recent collections have worked as a means of cross-cultural exchange; such as his Pantsula inspired collection, a Basotho cowboy one and his most recent that showed at the London Olympics. Embracing the dress aesthetic that emerged among migrant mineworkers during the 1950s, that collection is in dialogue with the past. “A lot of fashion trends have developed from poverty in the black communities,” he explains, detailing how mineworkers were forced to darn and fix their own suits, eventually arriving at garments dominated by mismatched or obvious reinforcements, to conceal frayed collars and holes appearing around pockets. Kopman exaggerated these reinforcement devices, turning them into details, design quirks for a high-end menswear collection.
The clever “local is lekker” vibe is always subtly present in his design and, in his upcoming winter collection for SA Fashion Week in October, he will present his first knitwear range that is fashioned from locally produced organic bamboo fabrics. He’s very excited about the new eco-friendly textiles he has sourced.
“Just feel this,” he beams, placing a bolt of soft white bamboo knit in my hand.
Kopman prides himself on innovation. Developing these distinctive South African designs is necessary if you want to compete on an international platform as a trendsetter rather than follower, he says.
“If you do your own thing, I think people are prouder to wear it.”
He wasn’t particularly proud of his first Naked Ape collection for SA Fashion Week. After it hit the runway he recoiled with disappointment. “I wanted to go and crawl into a small corner and spend a week there with a few bottles of severe liquor,” recalls the forty-something.
To most observers his response would have seemed misplaced; he had, after all, sent a collection of immaculate men’s suits down the ramp. With no formal fashion training, Kopman didn’t have the confidence to take the design reins and was dissatisfied with the outcome, which didn’t resonate with his own sense of style. “I always brought in other designers and I was clashing with them all the time. I can see it (the design) and visualise it.”
For his next collection, he borrowed Clive Rundle’s production manager Henry Strauss, sought out Rundle’s advice and went from spending R600/m on fabric to R25, but the end result was much more satisfying. It was a small collection, recalls Rundle, and Kopman was grappling with the presentation and giving it sex appeal.
“He eventually sent models down the ramp in Basotho blankets with nothing else underneath. That is how it is worn traditionally and it had more impact that way.”
Taking over the design of his label proved a turning point; it allowed Kopman to really discover his own voice, which has made design and business sense. Dion Chang, trends analyst and founder of Fluxtrends, believes this has been fundamental to the label’s success.
“He started with straight suits. I suppose every new menswear designer starts off there, but then he changed his pitch with an urban, contemporary twist. The suits weren’t luxury items like Row G nor Khalique’s off-the-peg numbers. There was always a bit of story to it (his collections), which I think is important these days. Sometimes they are perhaps a little too detailed for the street vibe so it’s been interesting watching how far he can push that envelope. I think his design business has become strategic; he has decided not to compete with (labels making) suits. And it’s working for him; his work has been well-received in New York,” says Chang.
Kopman isn’t quite ready to take New York on; he doesn’t have the capacity to deliver big orders.
“Everything is all bespoke… we don’t have 50 units in a warehouse.”
There is also the small matter of the labour intensive garments; the design details that make his garments special are challenging for mass production. Due to this, he has struggled to find the right balance between retaining the design aesthetic and making money – the two balls that all designers must juggle. If you drop one you’re done for.
“Our biggest hindrance is our pricing. I need to make more of a profit, because I am still selling garments at wholesale prices but I need to keep our price competitive and we don’t want to out-price our products either. A two piece suit costs R9 500 but it should actually cost R16 000 for it to make perfect business sense. My time, expertise and design hasn’t been factored in at all.”
His 2012 “Body Parts” collection probably best encapsulates the ingenuity of his design, and perhaps its inaccessibility. As the title implies, the jackets for the collection consisted of separated parts that could be assembled, via zips, to create a variety of jackets – up to 45. The concept came to him in a dream. The collection was a showstopper; even female observers were salivating over the garments – a rarity given the limited vernacular for menswear. When Kopman showed part of the collection in New York, Selfridges made enquiries. He couldn’t entertain their interest; he still has to figure out how to make these garments more affordable.
“They are a manufacturer’s nightmare,” he roars, as he puts on one of the jackets and looks at himself in the mirror. It looks tailor-made for him. This may be one of the drawbacks of his design, suggests Rundle. “Shaldon designs for himself. But not all of us are six-foot tall men with great bodies.”
Nevertheless, one of Rundle’s most coveted jackets bears the Naked Ape label, which has been a source of great pride for Kopman, who has famously dubbed Rundle the “godfather of SA fashion”.
“I love the way he mixes materials. It’s that kind of intensity that has drawn me to his garments. There are rough elements, some of it is made from rough hemp, the rest is leather. It’s a multi-functional garment; you can zip it up or down. I think what I also like about it and his clothing is that it is not smart or casual, but a bit of both. When I wear his jacket it’s about as smart as I’m ever going to get,” says Rundle.
Samuel L Jackson, the American actor, is also a big fan of Naked Ape. He encountered Kopman’s distinctive design when he was presented with a set of Naked Ape outfits for a film being shot in South Africa. Jackson fell in love with the label and ordered 10 Basotho “blankets”. Jackson’s endorsement clearly has left a deep impression. Photographs of him in a leather trimmed bamboo knit V-neck sweater for a GQ shoot are a recurring feature in the Naked Ape studio. Perhaps it’s because Kopman didn’t go the conventional route to becoming a menswear designer, via any formal training, that this endorsement carries such weight.
Kopman is keen to make money, but he is not working as a designer to make money. As with most designers, fashion claimed him at a young age. “Since I was 10 I cared about clothing. I think it was because my mother always wanted to be a designer.”
He doesn’t go into any detail but it’s clear he had a difficult childhood in Pietermaritzburg.
“I was at a majority white school, then a majority black school. My mom was single, we went from pillar to post, boarding in a room together. I come from rough neighbourhoods; I saw things I wouldn’t want to wish on anyone else. But I’m not going to mope about the past.”
Infusing street wear aspects into his up-end designs is probably the closest he gets to reconciling with his past, remaining tethered to it and connected to the life on Loveday Street.
“I take my inspiration from the street. I love it when I stop at a garage and the petrol attendant makes a remark about my outfit. My clothing is about them, is inspired by them. I know a lot about people. I sit on street corners and talk about life with guys while drinking quarts of beer.”
He translates that inspiration into expensive gear fashioned from exquisite fabrics that such men could only dream of, but that’s fashion: it turns inspiration into aspiration. - Sunday Independent