Dress, printed with trompe l'oeil motif of body wearing denim vest, denim trousers, black leather belt, boxers, designed by Thebe Magugu, Johannesburg, South Africa, 'Discard Theory' Autumn 2022

Full length dress with long sleeves and trompe l'oeil print motif.

This dress comes from Thebe Magugu's 'Discard Theory' collection which was first presented at the V&A’s Autumn 2022 Fashion in Motion, his first fashion show outside of Johannesburg. This show featured 25 looks inspired by Dunusa, a well-known market in downtown Johannesburg filled with secondhand clothes discarded by Europe and America. Dunusa means 'bend over', describing the action of reaching down and rummaging through the piles and bins of clothes that gather there. From Dunusa Magugu brought back to his studio pieces such as sweatshirts, denim cargo pants, tracksuits, and ties and analysed and manipulated these silhouettes and styles in order to reinterpret them into ‘high’ fashion. The trompe l'oeil print on this dress references denim items found in the market and reworked by Magugu. He describes ‘Discard Theory’ as a subversion of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 essay ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ which argues that waste and conspicuous consumption are two of the most critical signals of a country’s amassment of wealth and power and that fashion starts with those who are able to consume in large quantities and then makes its ways down to the lower classes. Magugu’s 2022 collection, instead, proposes the idea of ‘trickle-up fashion’, an inversion of the ‘trickle-down’ economic theory by pushing what the United States and Europe have deemed as waste back up into the luxury space. Magugu created a film documentary alongside the collection, shot in Dunusa, throughout Johannesburg, and in his studio. Magugu explains in the film that people in Johannesburg regularly purchase clothes from Dunusa and reappropriate and recontextualize them to create their own unique and cross-cultural styles of dress, a practice which the collection is also an homage to. The documentary concludes in Dunusa with hands finding a t-shirt with Thebe Magugu’s logo within the piles of discarded clothes and unfolding it to reveal it to the camera as if to suggest that this is eventually what will happen to all high fashion, including Maugu’s own work, given the wasteful nature and cycles of conspicuous consumption

This dress comes from designer Thebe Magugu's 'Discard Theory' collection which was first presented at the V&A’s Autumn 2022 Fashion in Motion. This show featured 25 looks inspired by Dunusa, a well-known market in downtown Johannesburg filled with secondhand clothes discarded by Europe and America. Dunusa means 'bend over', describing the action of reaching down and rummaging through the piles and bins of clothes that gather there. From Dunusa Magugu brought back to his studio pieces such as sweatshirts, denim cargo pants, tracksuits, and ties and analysed and manipulated these silhouettes and styles in order to reinterpret them into ‘high’ fashion. The trompe l'oeil print on this dress references denim items found in the market and reworked by the designer. Magugu describes ‘Discard Theory’ as a subversion of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 essay ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ which argues that waste and conspicuous consumption are two of the most critical signals of a country’s amassment of wealth and power and that fashion starts with those who are able to consume in large quantities and then makes its ways down to the lower classes. Magugu’s 2022 collection, instead, proposes the idea of ‘trickle-up fashion’, an inversion of the ‘trickle-down’ economic theory by pushing what has been deemed as waste, back up into the luxury space. Magugu created a documentary film about the collection, shot in Dunusa, throughout Johannesburg, and in his studio. Magugu explains in the film that people in Johannesburg regularly purchase clothes from Dunusa and reappropriate and recontextualize them to create their own unique and cross-cultural styles of dress, a practice which the collection is also an homage to. The documentary concludes in Dunusa with hands finding a t-shirt with Thebe Magugu’s logo within the piles of discarded clothes and unfolding it to reveal it to the camera as if to suggest that this is eventually what will happen to all high fashion, including Maugu’s own work, given the wasteful nature and cycles of conspicuous consumption.

T.30-2024