Thrift culture takes over Braamfontein with new creative hub for vintage fashion and art
The Playground is ‘a considered space, playing host to a regular entertainment every Saturday with a variety of gourmet street food, cocktails, and live music performances and deejays’.
Thrift culture takes over Braamfontein. Photo: Graye Olifant
JOHANNESBURG - In a groundbreaking move for local fashion culture, The Playground in Braamfontein recently hosted a first-of-its-kind thrifting event called Thrift.
The Playground is ‘a considered space, playing host to a regular entertainment every Saturday with a variety of gourmet street food, cocktails, and live music performances and deejays’.
On 26 April, the event was launched.
Organiser Graye Olifant had this to say: “We’re turning The Playground into a treasure trove of fashion, culture, and creativity. It is a day of thrifting with Joburg’s best vendors, curated stalls, delicious food, good music and unexpected finds.
“Whether you’re a vintage lover, a streetwear hunter or looking for high fashion, it is all available to choose from the 40 thrift vendors we have selected, through the application process we had opened,” she said.
In attendance was Bontle Mphailane, a sartorial artist, fashion designer and thrift vendor channelling Lauryn Hill’s soulful aesthetic, with her thick long dreadlocks tied up in a high-top bun, wearing a black skintight silk shirt coupled with a black pencil leather skirt and platform boots.
She said the only way to express herself is through fashion, “this is the only way I get to stand out from the rest”.
Mphailane said as someone who grew up in Soweto, “fashion was very closed off, especially because of the large numbers of people living in poverty, when your focus is on where you will be getting your next meal, you can’t be worrying about clothes.”
While in her own capacity, she makes avant-garde fashion characterised by designs that are experimental, artistic, and push the boundaries of conventional style, often challenging societal norms and perspectives.
Mphailane sells high-end fashion clothing, which she finds at the thrift hub of Johannesburg, Dunusa, derived from the Zulu word meaning bend down, and speaks to the act of searching through piles of clothes on the floors of the streets of Joburg CBD. The vendors are found opposite the MTN Taxi rank on De Villiers Street and Klein Street. These clothes are dumped from China, Europe and other places overseas.
A contemporary artist, Lesedi Manganye, partnered up with one of the vendors selling his art along with the thrift clothes.
“My art is about sharing the day-to-day emotions that we all experience but people are afraid to show, like sadness or anger,” he said.
Like the act of buying used goods or clothes, historically it’s a concept that was shunned upon, but thrifting has made it fashionable again.
He creates his art on recycled material such as woven polypropylene, which is the packaging used to carry coal. Their collaboration is called dirt church, speaking to all that people have “thrown away” is now taken and made useful again, the play on words refers to dirt as the thing discarded and the church as a haven.
One of his other paintings is made from mash paper, with the framing of recycled string. The collaboration is inspired by Johannesburg, and recycling.
“We are giving life to things that were dead, and an event like this isn’t only about art and clothes, it’s about welcoming everyone, the misfits and people who are misunderstood”.
Another vendor at the event was FVCK, a brand that works as a social impact organisation, using street fashion to communicate messages of positivity to their target audience.
Managing director, Linda Motaung, says their brand FVCK stands for forget violence, create kings.
“We decided to actually take a stance against things happening in our society such as discrimination, gender-based violence and all forms of violence and that and use fashion to point out the social injustices and use fashion to address these.”