The African fashion scene has been making huge strides, globally, in recent years, and has been receiving the recognition it deserves. African designer’s including Thebebe Magugu and others have been drawing widespread attention to the continent. Hamethop is one of South Africa’s fashion brands that has been making big moves, recently launching its SS/23 Rat Race collection at Paris Fashion Week.
Hamethop’s SS/23 collection was unveiled at Tranoi, which is Paris Fashion Week’s trade partner, and with the support of CANEX, an African Export-Import Bank initiative. The brand’s latest collection examines the deep state of limbo and the need to escape one’s conditioning.
Made up of a monochrome palette the SS/23 range features pared-back knits that focus on simple wardrobe essentials in the forms of matching sets, distinctive denim, and t-shirts. Everything you’d need to be comfortably cool while going about your day-to-day activities.
The collection is fronted by Paw-Gah, the mascot for the season, which takes centre stage as a recurring print motif on handbags as well as clothing items. The print confronts life beyond societal boundaries and highlights the interpretation of the concepts of time, escapism, rest, imagination and belonging. Handbags, one of the brand’s most endured accessories, come in sleek minimalist shapes and feature inventive sculptural handles, and hardware covered in gold. The bags also feature details and illustrations of a ladder, a metaphor for the path to success.
The SS/23 collection is based on the Rat Race, a way of life in which people are continuously caught up in the fiercely competitive struggle for wealth and power. Hamethop intends to change this continuous busyness and allow you an escape into a world of calm. “As we chase ourselves and the unknown, we befriend noise, intoxication, hollow spaces that feel whole, lies that feel true. There are some that escape the pain, and there are others who become it. Running is not the question, it is where we run to, and how our escape techniques settle into our nervous systems, soothe us, and start to feel less daunting and more like our ideal world.”
