Winning Women: Marianne Fassler – Fearless fashionista

Marianne Fassler’s home in ­Saxonwold, ­Johannesburg, which incorporates her Leopard Frock studio, is fascinating and esoteric – just like her award-winning garments.

When you walk through the front door, you enter a world of whimsy and quirkiness, of mosaic floors, coloured-glass windows and multilayered outfits that would not have looked out of place on the Queen of Sheba.

In the studio, a young woman – one of many who are being mentored by Fassler – bends over a wedding gown on to which she’s painstakingly sewing sequins.

Feathers may follow.

It all depends on the collective mood and suggestions of the designers, seamstresses and, naturally, the client.

One thing is certain – no two outfits will look the same.

The red-haired, dreadlocked designer is wearing takkies and wide pants. She mentions that she doesn’t like reading about fashion in glossy magazines or watching it on TV.

But she does love crafts, creativity, music, architecture, pop culture and experimentation, which provide her with inspiration.

“I work with a team of 13 creative people, so no outfit is mine alone,” she says.

It thrills Fassler that she’s designing a dress for a young woman whose family she’s created clothing for over many years – three generations of the same family, in fact.

“We’re doing a matriculant’s dance dress. We created her mother’s wedding gown and her grandmother’s outfit for a barmitzvah.”

Fassler, who describes herself as “fantastically, obsessively patriotic”, has travelled the world, showing her designs, and collecting fabrics and interesting objects that inspire her.

Last year, Labo International, the fashion talents and trends hunter, invited her to Paris to show her designs.

In 2014, she won the SA Designer of the Year award at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Africa and delivered a TEDx talk before the year was out.

TED Talks is an international initiative that provides a ­platform for ideas, given by experts in their fields, worth spreading.

Her work, Beauty Remained, in collaboration with ­choreographer Robyn Orlin, has travelled the world to ­standing ovations and full houses. It opened the French-South African cultural festival in 2014 in Paris.

Orlin has just completed another dance piece with Fassler, which will open in Paris in July.

Year after year, judges have described the designer’s ­collections at South African shows as “the best”.

One talked about her “fierce juxtapositions of colour and texture, delectable details and a robust but feminine Afro­urban aesthetic that keeps on reinventing itself”.

Fassler shows me a layered evening dress, explaining that scraps of material from other creations have been used to make it. “We throw nothing away,” she says.

Some fashion designers become dressmakers for the ­superrich, “but I am not one of them. My clients do not need another ‘little dress for a lunch’.”

She says she needs to know why people wear what they wear.

“If you have nothing to wear, then you don’t know who you are.”

She believes that fashion reflects history, global events and change, “but it does not cause change”.

She views it like the coal miners of old who took canaries down mines to test oxygen levels. “Fashion, like the canaries, tells you what is happening in the world.”

Fassler opened her first shop in 1976 just as Soweto ­exploded with student protests.

But the BA (Hons) Wits University graduate never lost the vision and fortitude that have landed her where she is today.

Her mother is the artist Hannatjie van der Wat, “and she painted every single day, so I knew it was possible to run a successful business from home and be a mother”.

Fassler, a mother of two, stepmother of five and now a grandmother, is pleased she works from home, explaining that some women live in gorgeous houses they never see, with children whose lives are run by au pairs.

This earthy, vital African’s life reflects her intrinsic sense of self and belonging on our vast continent.