Fashion as Art at Norval

There are events that remind you what this city is capable of. Heirloom Futures at Norval Foundation in April was one of them.

The premise was as simple as it was quietly radical: fashion as art. Not fashion as commerce, not fashion as spectacle – but exquisitely beautiful handmade garments, footwear and jewellery by leading African designers, among them Rich Mnisi, exhibited as cultural artefacts inside one of Cape Town's most considered museum spaces. Given the same weight, the same light, the same reverence as any painting or sculpture in the building. It reframed something familiar and made you see it entirely differently.

I attended the preview, but the exhibition culminated in a live show and benefit auction presented with Strauss & Co – models animating the garments before and during bidding, Cape Town City Ballet performing in between, the whole thing unfolding against Norval's extraordinary architecture. The kind of event where every element earns its place.

What stayed with me was the underlying argument: that a garment made by hand, rooted in heritage and cultural identity, deserves to be collected and preserved in the same way we preserve paintings. That clothing can be legacy. It's a conversation long overdue, and Norval – with its deep commitment to African art and artists – is exactly the right institution to be having it.

And if Heirloom Futures is any indication, Norval is having a remarkable year. Brett Murray's Wild Life – more than eighty sculptures spanning four decades of fearless, razor-sharp work – runs until November 2026. Irma Stern: A Life of Displacement, a landmark multi-year series developed with the Irma Stern Trust and Nedbank, is currently showing while the Irma Stern Museum undergoes restoration – a rare opportunity to engage with her archive in a new context. And in Gallery 1, Portia Zvavahera's luminous, spiritually charged paintings hold the room until September in a way that's very hard to walk away from.

It's a place doing serious, beautiful work. Go.

Norval Foundation, 4 Steenberg Road, Tokai | norvalfoundation.org