Daimler
Contemporary
Mercedes-
Benz Award
for South African Art and Culture 2009
Fashion Design
Mantsho
Maya Prass
David Tlale
Black Coffee (Winner)Celebrated label Black Coffee emerged from South Africa at a time when personal identity was the new differentiator. The energy that drives Black Coffee's designers, Jacques van der Watt and Danica Lepen, is always consistent, yet producing results that are never the same.
Their innovative thinking - combined with meticulous construction and attention to detail - have placed them at the forefront of South African fashion. Their approach is deeply referential, meticulously engineered and ultimately divergent. It's an ethos that embraces contrast and re-shapes traditions with an intuitive twist. The results are mysteriously familiar yet refreshingly distinct, occupying a space somewhere between history and imagination.
In the ten years since its formation, Black Coffee has shown locally and at the San Francisco Fashion Week and has won the SA Fashion Awards twice, in 2001 and 2007. The sub-brand Everyonecanbeadesigner by Black Coffee also sells successfully and is a completely modern capsule wardrobe that consists of mutable garments that can each be worn in multiple ways.
Mantsho
Maya Prass
David Tlale