Cape Town - Sheray Goliath Bakos traces her career in fashion design to an Athlone tutelage that was comprehensive enough, by the age of 10, to equip her for her first business venture – making the pom-pom hairbands she sold to schoolmates at 50c apiece.
She was in Standard 2 – or Grade 4; by then, she had already gained a sufficient mastery of needle and thread to be able to dress her dolls from scratch. She was also already certain enough that the fashion industry was her métier.
And how could it have been otherwise, with no fewer than four dressmakers – mom, gran and two aunts – in her formative universe?
Today, Goliath Bakos – she turns 37 next month – is the creative and entrepreneurial force behind WAG, a design and fashion emporium in Long Street, Cape Town, for whom the central city is the dynamo of her creative and domestic life.
She is alive to the city as a businesswoman, but also as a designer, saying she’ll often find her ideas in the cut or fabric of an outfit worn by a stranger passing on the pavement.
The mother of two – a boy of 12, a daughter of four – lives in Rose Street, Bo-Kaap, just a few streets away, and is so attuned to city centre life that when weekends come around and she takes her family on outings to Franschhoek or Langebaan “it feels like we’re visiting somewhere else in the world”.
If her weekends are precious, and strictly reserved for family time, her weekday life is an intensive immersion in the urban energy of her Long Street shop, and all that goes with it.
Though she counts the dressmaking milieu of her family – her late grandmother Doris Japhta, her aunts Louisa Bartman and Loretta Lawrence, and her mom, Connie Jansen – as the founding inspiration of her career, she acknowledges that when she left school, her interest in fashion was a source of unease in the family, who were anxious that “I might not be able to make something big out of it”.
Never having much money was an impressionable feature of family lore; she recalled being told how her grandmother, who had 10 children, would line them up on the day before Christmas and sew new outfits for them, one by one.
“There was never the money to buy new clothes.”
So, when it came to her choosing a career, skill was one thing (as a teen, she’d make most of her outfits herself), but against the reality of a declining garment industry, and the family’s consciousness of its “below-middle-income” fortunes, Goliath Bakos was persuaded to make the most of the acumen she had displayed at school, and study something else instead.
Dutifully, she completed studies in human resource management – which, of course, she observes wryly, have proved useful … in her fashion career.
After spending two years in London, mainly working in fashion stores, an encounter with a friend on her return prompted a new venture. The friend worked for British Airways, and the two decided to take a holiday together in Bangkok.
“While we were there, we saw all these nice clothes and decided to bring some back.”
Through another friend, they rented space in a Kloof Street shop, and opened for business. After a while Goliath Bakos began to concentrate on her own designs, while her friend managed the imports.
Discerning shoppers may remember her designs at the time in outlets such as YDE.
In 2002, she opened WAG. The shop has always been in Long Street, though the present premises at number 62 is the shop’s fourth location.
“Long Street has always been exciting, and the inspiring designers on the street were role models for me. It’s always been the street where you shop for local designers, though there are few left today.”
But the trade is buoyant – tourist shoppers especially. And, with a view to showcasing a wider variety of garments, WAG started to take in work by other designers from the beginning of the year.
Designers featured in the shop today are Mareth Roos-Haupt of Brava Clothing Line, Abbas, Frida Yvette of Durban’s Frida Couture, Lucy Goretti, Bokang Lehabe of Bookha, Janine Evans of Qaff, and Kenyan shoe designer Tetsi Bugaari of Buqisi-Ruux.
WAG also offers custom-made garments – for weddings and matric dances, for instance – alterations, and eight-week fashion training courses (beginner, intermediate or advanced).
As part of a home-grown community programme, Goliath Bokas also employs and mentors two assistant designers, Aidan Jephta and Be-Artha Petersen, each of whom has a diploma in fashion design.
“They are not just assistants… the idea is that they are here to learn and train intensively so that they grow to be strong enough to start their own rail in the store, and then potentially have a strong brand for themselves. And they do the works, from designing to sales.”
Two other women in the shop, Veronica Bougaardt and Angela Jessman, are formerly jobless work seekers whom Goliath Bakos took in with a view to giving them a skill.
“My approach is, we want to teach people to fish, rather than just giving them a fish. Whoever I take in will gain skills they can use to earn good money, and that’s part of what WAG is all about.”
It’s a telling, and poignant, footnote to Goliath Bakos’s enterprise that the name WAG – easily mistaken as a token of the sassy idiom of Long Street’s indie fashion scene – actually memorialises her late father, William Arthur Goliath.
He died 24 years ago, and it was hard “losing the most solid person in my life, my best friend”.
When she launched her business, the name “just came into my mind”, and naturally perhaps, as she counts him as the author of her drive and confidence, the father who would often remind her as a young girl that “there’s nothing anyone can do that you can’t do better”.
Weekend Argus