Having grown up online, Khensani recognises the paradox of a generation raised by the internet (and her visibility as a content creator) that at some point, it almost always inspires a turn away from it, back toward the tangible world. For her, the hand is as vital a site of learning as the archive or the algorithm. “As much as I love the internet and how connected it’s made us, a lot of this work needs to happen offline,” she says. “This is a tactile practice. Being in the same physical space with someone who’s making changes everything. Even in my workshops, I’ve noticed how people have almost no idea how textiles come together until they try it. The moment they do, something shifts — they see differently. That, to me, is education.”
Khensani approaches South Africa’s textile legacy with the eye of a historian and the sensitivity of a maker, and in tracing how the nation’s fabric industries mirror its social and political transformations. One of her observations keenly acknowledges and situates South Africa as a vital node within global textile history; “South Africa actually has a fascinating textile history that’s been overlooked. Pre-Cape Colony, we were in a unique position — textiles came here through trade from India and Indonesia, which were already global leaders. Later, under apartheid’s isolation, local industries had to become self-sufficient, and that created a kind of forced excellence in certain sectors. Some older people say brands like Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren used to produce here. I haven’t found the evidence, but it tells you something about the level of skill that existed. The textile unions were also some of the first integrated spaces in the country, which is incredible when you think about it. A lot of the organising women of the 1956 Women’s March were from the same textile unions.”
The decline of the local textile sector after democracy marks, as Khensani notes, equally an economic loss and an epistemic one — a rupture in intergenerational knowledge. “After 1994, a lot of that collapsed. Factories closed, machinery wasn’t updated, and with China’s rise, we just couldn’t compete. You still find women who were seamstresses sitting at home now with nothing to do — women who can pattern-cut, stitch, embroider — all of it. It’s tragic, because that’s living knowledge. Still, I think there’s a slow reawakening — partly out of necessity. Retailers want faster turnaround times, so local production makes sense again. But I hope it’s more than just economic — that it’s also cultural, that we start valuing our own systems of making.” The future of South African fashion, she suggests, is in reactivating the dormant intelligence of the hands that once made the country’s cloth.
Khensani describes herself as “disgustingly optimistic,” to which I gleefully agree. Despite the noise and nihilism of the world, her hope feels like the correct course of action. We have so, so much potential and promise, as Khensani reminds me. “What makes me hopeful is that the designers who are thriving now are the ones looking inward, who are working from their own archives. There’s a shift towards self-sufficiency and not in some weird nationalist way, but as a kind creative sovereignty. There are people who are making isidwaba the same way they were hundreds and hundreds of years ago. There are still people who do beading the same way, who have different solutions for the types of materials we could be making from — combinations of things that have been happening here for generations. What I would hope for is greater platforming and centring of that kind of knowledge. And also, solutions that make sense here. We don’t necessarily need the right conditions for growing cotton or flax — but maybe hemp?”
“Hemp’s something that’s been around for quite a while,” Khensani reflects. “I’m hoping more people start to feel that it’s important to invest in their own cultures, and that there’s a stronger drive to put resources into that. We don’t have to operate within the traditional fashion system of constant, unending newness. There’s value in being more connected to your local tailor, your local maker — or even becoming that person yourself. Everyone could benefit from a deeper understanding of how these things come together.”
Khensani’s vision is one of continuity; grounded and restorative. It cannot be overstated why knowing fashion history, or understanding the systems and stories that shape it, matters. The premise of any real fashion literacy begins with recognising what fashion is as a sartorial medium of communication, a language through which we signal identity, belonging, and belief. In Khensani’s hands, dress is a record of how people have always been – on some level – committed to cloth as one of our most important material experiments.
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