Cape Town Style

Sunset over Table Mountain, May 2013:

the view from the front door

I write from Camps Bay, a southern suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, and when I started this post earlier today I was looking due west across a pink morning South Atlantic horizon. If you drew a straight line west to the next big land mass, you'd bump into the border of Brazil and Uruguay.

Winter approaches here: the days are short, with sunset around 6:00 pm, cool enough for heavy fleece when the sun is low and I wrap my hands around a mug of tea (or a generous glass of Pinotage). We're staying with dear friends who are here on sabbatical and who are kind enough to open their gorgeous flat to us.

There's something very comforting to me about being back in the Southern Hemisphere. It's been, of course, almost two and a half years since I left the South Pacific. South Africa is decidedly different from NZ in many ways, but there are enough similarities - from the craggy shoreline rocks to the bottle brush trees, to the Norfolk Island pine silhouetted against the sunset, even small things like the fact that arugula is called "rocket" and a latte-type coffee drink is called a "flat white" - that I feel a bit like I'm back on my "radiation vacation." 

Another similarity is that both NZ and Cape Town are known for outstanding local design. Yesterday we ventured into slightly gritty downtown CPT and walked around Long St., where upmarket boutiques sell the best in South and pan-African design near a tourist market full of more pedestrian (but still fun) "African" tchotchkes (some of the fabrics looked decidedly Indian). There's some serious style here, and the younger, more fashion-forward set - including this beautiful young woman trying on sunglasses - wouldn't be out of place in, say, Brooklyn:

What makes this design scene very different from the States, however, is how affordable locally-designed, locally-made clothes are. As someone who rarely buys new clothing, I appreciate knowing that there are places where style can be had on a budget without being mass-produced. At the boutique Mungo & Jemima, I got this adorable sailor-style top by South African designer I Love Leroy:

I also stumbled into a shop called Merchants on Long, which has some of the most amazing modern African clothing I've ever seen. Their goods are ethically produced by designers across the continent, and last year the Financial Times described it as "the continent's premier resource for the best African-crafted design in everything from fashion to homewares, and even music."

I was surprised and delighted to find this enormous silk & cotton scarf by Kenya-based LaLesso, because I recognized the pattern from something I had been ogling online from home. Obviously, now that I know I CAN MATCH MY SCARF TO MY ESPADRILLES, I will be buying those. 

The most beautiful objet du jour, however, was another scarf that I purchased from Merchants on Long. Made by the Johannesburg-based company African Strings, it pairs a silk Liberty-print fabric with traditional Zulu beadwork, to stunning effect.

Merchants on Long's Twitter feed last summer suggested that one could wear it like this, but the beading might be heavy:

Lest it seem as though all I've been doing is thinking about and buying beautiful textiles, let me edify you, dear reader: have you heard of fynbos? 

It almost sounds like an old-timey curse, but it's not. (Still, I can imagine someone hurling it as an invective.) This small area of the Western Cape has its own unique and very rare vegetation type, known as fynbos. Indeed, the flora here are so unusual that the beautiful "silver trees" in the yard and near the house here occur in nature only on the slopes of Table Mountain - so I feel very lucky to have seen them. 

In fact, I just feel lucky, period.

Namaste,

Kelley