Cape Town - Fashion designer, innovator and compulsive creative Cheryl Arthur is probably best known for founding the Hip Hop label, but now she’s gone back to the drawing board, launching a new label drawn from new inspiration.
“I’ve got a long reputation… However, no matter how much experience you have, it’s very hard to start a label,” she admits, adding that she’s got plenty of respect for emerging fashion designers.
Her self-titled Cheryl Arthur Spring Summer 2013 line aims to embrace comfort and affordability, to be “charmingly beautiful”, as she puts it.
Today the Hip Hop brand is 25 years old, but Arthur no longer has any links to it. She sold the brand in 2011 and consulted for a year after that, but now all ties have been cut.
She’s frank that it’s time for change, for something new and fresh. And this time she’s put her own name on it to show that it’s hers.
Arthur says she built Hip Hop to be an independently owned fashion house with its own retail stores, wholesalers, manufactures and a staff of 90. It really was a “phenomenal success story” for South African fashion.
But the stress built, and she decided to sell.
“I’ve moved on. The only problem is that people still associate me with it,” she says.
Leaving Hip Hop did not, however, mean that Arthur left behind her creative flame. And even though her appointment as chairwoman of the South African National Fashion Council, and being an executive committee member of the Cape Town Fashion Council, has kept her very busy, she says she needed an exciting creative project to get stuck in to.
“I love colour and print and shape and form,” she says. “It must be different so it’s not going to lose its fashion edge in one season.”
Her designs are influenced not just by fashion and trends, but by what is driving and influencing the world of art, life, culture, movies and music.
Arthur has built her new collection with a vision of making it wearable, comfortable and beautiful, but also versatile – a factor that women often search for and struggle to find.
She has embraced what she describes as cutting-edge technology for her fabrics, having digital prints reflecting an eclectic mix including influences of nature, mythology, seasons, trees and goddesses.
The fabrics she uses are sourced from around the world, and include silks from China, rayon, viscose, knits – generally natural fibres that create contrast and are comfortable. She says that silk is lightweight and it breathes, making it perfect for South African summer months.
Arthur is frank about the collapse of South Africa’s textile industry, which she says cannot compete with Asia, where there is “some phenomenal new breakthrough in textiles” every six months.
This is one thing she will be addressing in her capacity with the South African Fashion Council.
But while Arthur may head elsewhere for fabrics and textiles, she believes that manufacturing and finding ways to add value locally – like hand-printing, beading and embroidery – are very important.
Some of Arthur’s favourite designers are Britain’s Vivienne Westwood, Denmark’s Malene Birger and Greece’s Mary Katrantzou, but she says she also admires European high-street brands and the stimulating collections from Miu Miu and Prada.
Even though she wanted to be “all sorts of things”, including a pilot, before she decided to be a designer, Arthur’s interest in fashion was instilled years before by her mother who broke fashion boundaries in the small town of White River in Mpumalanga.
“My mother was very stylish. She used to wear these little Chanel-type suits. She used to make me these very high-fashion outfits.
“If it was too modern, or not available in stores, she would just make it.
“I was lucky in that way. She taught me a love of innovating style.”
* The Cheryl Arthur SS13 collection will be in store at Stuttafords and The Space until December. It will also be launched online at www.spree.co.za. - Weekend Argus