The exhibition Mother Tongue at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum is a living history lesson on the influence of traditional Xhosa fashion on contemporary design, linking past to future trends.
It also shows how the teenagers of yesteryears were just as keen to push the fashion boundaries as the post-Millennial generation of today, using beadwork from the Eastern Cape.
Mother Tongue highlights how wearing large quantities of beadwork was an indication of popularity among Xhosa-speaking teenage boys.
In one photograph dating back almost 60 years, for example, beads adorn a Tembu teenager who has used them to embellish a pair of spectacles.
The exhibition also marks how traditional African designs have surged onto the world’s fashion ramps with 2018’s Hollywood blockbuster movie, Black Panther, featuring traditional Xhosa designs created by Port Elizabeth-bred designer Laduma Ngxokolo.
His Ngxokolo’s MaXhosa brand is now world famous with international celebrities seen in his knitted garments.
“In a century from now, I want people to look back at MaXhosa and get an understanding of what Xhosa people were like in our time,” Ngxokolo says in Mother Tongue.
It is worth taking the time to read the notes accompanying the exhibits as they explain the deeper meaning behind what many only know as jewellery.
Ironically, beads were originally a foreign element, yet today they are considered an integral part of the Eastern Cape’s visual culture.
There is also an interactive element as visitors are invited to use the material and wire frame provided to style a doek and then share a photograph of this to the museum’s page.
There are many different ways to wear iQhiya – colloquially known as a doek – from modern to more classical styles used at formal occasions, say the exhibition notes.
Mother Tongue includes far more than beads, however.
It also reveals creative ways Eastern Cape artists have used shiny buttons, binding tape and cotton baize to create and embellish garments.
There also are meanings in the colours used and different beads are meant to be worn at different ages and stages.
One beader says, for example, that you will never see a child wearing turquoise beads, while those seen on a young man are different to those worn by a man who has been circumcised.
Take a few minutes extra to watch the videos at the back of the hall and learn how older women – generally the custodians of culture – yearn to pass on their beading skills to the next generation.
One suggests that on school civvies days, children should be asked to wear a traditional beaded item – what a beautiful way to transmit the message that art and culture are treasures to be valued.
Gallery hours are 9am to 5pm on weekdays, except Tuesday mornings and public holidays. The exhibition closes in March. For more information, phone 041-506-2000.