Thebe Magugu Unveils His Project for AZ Factory

Thebe Magugu never met Alber Elbaz, but he was captivated by his gripping runway shows for Lanvin, soigné cocktail dresses and his charismatic personality, discovered via “Fashion Television” once his family in Kimberley, South Africa, had saved up enough to get satellite TV.

“I admired his kindness and the sense of duty he had for others,” Magugu marveled this week as he unveiled the collection he did for AZ Factory as its first “guest amigo” since the death of its founder last year.

Dropping in June and September, the collection saw Magugu pick up seamlessly where Elbaz had left off at AZ Factory, exalting the print and textile research Elbaz had initiated before passing, while adding signatures from his five-year-old, Johannesburg-based brand.

As reported, Elbaz dreamed of a new kind of fashion company with arms open to like-minded creativity, and so the go-forward strategy at AZ Factory will be based on serial guest talents and freewheeling projects, as reported.

In an interview at AZ Factory’s headquarters in the glass Fondation Cartier building, Magugu clicked through look book photos on a laptop and shuttled to and from the racks, showing off knife-pleated skirts with scarf-point hemlines, and handsome wool coats with a flourish of shoulder volume, or a bib front that peels open and droops, revealing a white cotton lining.

Magugu was one of 46 designers and brands invited to create an Elbaz-inspired look for the mammoth “Love Brings Love” tribute show last October, now the focus of an exhibition at the Musee Galliera in Paris, and with Magugu’s white blouse, skirt and feathered hat on all the posters.

The young designer admitted it was a thrill seeing the posters “on every second corner” as the taxi ferried him from the airport, and he reprised the look from one of Elbaz’s early Guy Laroche collections, dip-dyeing the angular hemline in a brilliant blue shade.

He said he was tickled by the fact that his tribute design is being preserved by a leading fashion museum — and even more by the prospect of giving people access to it via his one-off collection for AZ Factory.

Magugu said his guest stint at the label felt more like “an incubator more than a collaboration.” He gelled with the design team Elbaz had recruited, and learned to design by draping as Elbaz often did, assembling random bits of knitwear into a striking one-shoulder top, and a sexy yellow dress that clings here and lets loose there.

He said he would leave the building with a cache of crucial industry contacts, including possible new suppliers, and fond memories. “I think I’ve learned so much, and I made so many incredible new friends here,” he said.

Compagnie Financière Richemont, which established AZ Factory as a joint venture with Elbaz in 2019, now intends to invite talents who need “support and help” at a critical juncture in their careers. The strategy is analogous in some ways to fashion prizes, only offering an entire ecosystem — a design studio, atelier, marketing muscle and communications channels — and not only cash and mentoring.

On the creative front, Magugu was given carte blanche, and the project he submitted last December highlighted his South African origins and Elbaz’s birthplace in Morocco, on the other end of the same continent. It led him to craft the theoretical question: “What if Africa was the birthplace of couture?”

He explained that many of the characteristics of European luxury — storytelling, painstaking and time-consuming savoir-faire, and an heirloom approach to creation — also exist in African craft. “It’s just a different world, but it’s the exact same approach,” he explained.

To be sure, Magugu aligned immediately with the founder’s penchant for dressy fabrics, and his unique approach to prints. Elbaz had commissioned Paris-based Algerian artist Chafik Cheriet to create an array of prints, including an animal pattern that Magugu described as “like someone drawing cheetahs from memory.”

The young designer added his own interpretations of African dress, including flowing caftans; a white, bell-sleeved knit column based on a “makoti” or bridal dress, and artfully folded African headdresses known as “gele” that he also interpreted as ruffle-topped bucket bags, some suspended from a wrist cord.

Magugu confessed that when he was gorging on “Fashion Television,” his main measuring stick for good fashion was “how visually striking it was,” whereas today he increasingly appreciates “the psychological power it can have, and how it can make someone feel a certain way.”

He was captivated by Elbaz’s embrace of so-called “smart fabrics” — including ones with gradient stretch. “It’s been interesting to see that intersection of that of aesthetic and function, which I think was really important to him and really important to me as well as as a designer,” he said.

While Elbaz’s first product stories were focused largely on body-con shapes, “a lot of my proportions are quite away from the body,” Magugu said, showing off snug tanks erupting in a froth of fabric at the hem, and the bubble-shaped back of bomber jackets and trenchcoats.

The collection will be sold on the AZ Factory web store, Farfetch, Net-a-porter and select wholesale partners.

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