When fashion shows become like Miss Katwe

By karungi kabuye

Brenda Nambi is a fashion designer. She designs clothes, has them made and tailored, and sells them for a living. So to show what she has she occasionally holds fashion shows where people come and see what she has, buy or maybe make an order.

Sometime last year she had her first fashion show at the Garden City roof top. I got there early, like I always do, to check out the set-up. In a small place like that the ramp (or runway, or catwalk) should not be more than a foot (about 30cm) off the ground.This one was almost half a metre, but it had already been built, so there was nothing much I could do about it.

So I turned to the lighting set-up. Lighting is a very important aspect of fashion shows, for the designer is showing what she has, and the people have to see the clothes in their true colour, form and shape. That means the lights have to be bright and they have to be white.

It was a young guy at the lights control console and he bragged about how his lights were computer controlled. Would he be kind enough to turn them on so I could check them out? He obliged, with a big grin on his face. It turned out they were all kinds of colours — red, green, orange, blue and all kinds of mixes.

I explained that those wouldn’t do, because they would make the clothes look different. Imagine a red light on a white outfit, or green light on a yellow outfit. A very chastened lad then promised he would only use the white lights, but was very disappointed he couldn’t play with his computer-controlled lights.

It also turned out he had stationed two very bright lights right where the runway begun, shining straight ahead. Net result was that the guests couldn’t see much of the models because the lights were in their eyes, and they also shone right into the cameras at the end of the ramp. Brenda was not very happy with the photographs she got that night.

A year later and she held another fashion show, this time Ali Alibhai of Talent Africa was in charge. Now, Ali is a wide-travelled man, and will as spend his holidays in California as drive down to the beach in Entebbe on a Sunday afternoon. But I don’t think he has ever organised a proper fashion show before, because he planned to have one lone spotlight shine on the models. Net result was that the models all looked yellow, and you couldn’t see anything once they passed where you were sitting. Again, some really lousy pictures came through.

Fashion shows have always been taken as entertainment in Uganda, where guys mostly came to ogle the models and hope for a telephone number at the end of it all. Otherwise why would the guy who bid for the fashion shows at this year’s Bride & Groom Expo arrange the stage like Straka was going to launch her debut album in a pub in Katwe?

It wouldn’t work, we told him, but the guys from Mase Consult, the firm contracted to organise the show, refused to change anything they had set up. So for three days and seven fashion shows the disco lights he had set up remained unused, and emergency stands with plain lights were set up instead. Not the best of lighting, but a lot better than the guys from Mase Consult had.

These guys were fully paid, of course, but I doubt if they will get another job lighting up a fashion show.

The fashion industry is expanding rapidly, not really an explosion yet, but it is getting there. Fashion shows are very important avenues for designers to showcase their garments, so we really should try and get it right. Having organised a Miss Katwe pageant where the winner took home some air-time does not make a credible fashion organiser.

Who am I to speak forth? I have attended all the Face of Africa finals, the continent’s largest model search; have taken more than one million fashion photographs and been back stage at various Fashion Weeks, from Kampala to Nairobi to Dar es Salaam to Johannesburg to Cape Town. And my brief sojourn at the New York Fashion Week taught me volumes, too.
So folks, let us try and get it right, okay?