For Lucilla Booyzen, success is a designer's thank-you text

Behind the glitter of Johannesburg runways this October stood a woman measuring success not in applause but in WhatsApp messages. When a designer texts Lucilla Booyzen to say that SA Fashion Week helped grow their business, she counts it among the most rewarding moments of her work. It is a small, personal gesture. Yet it captures what the event, held in the city from October 21 to 25, has meant to the people who build their lives around South African fashion.

For Booyzen, the platform’s director, another edition has just wrapped up, and what lingers with her is not the spectacle. It is the people. Designers, many of them building labels without any funding at all, keep finding ways to survive and grow. Their resilience is what makes her proud, along with the growing recognition the industry now receives in South Africa, across Africa and internationally.

“What stood out most was an overall strong sense of growth,” she says, pointing to improvements in design, craftsmanship, cultural representation and, crucially, in designers’ grasp of how creativity can become a working business.

That last part matters more than it might sound. Fashion, in Booyzen’s view, is about identity, culture, creativity and the courage to stand out. But she has spent long enough in the industry to know that a beautiful collection alone does not pay anyone’s bills. When a designer succeeds, she explains, the benefits ripple outward to manufacturers, suppliers, retailers and other creative professionals whose livelihoods depend on that success. One thriving label can sustain work for many people who never appear on a runway.

Her advice to emerging designers is blunt: learn the business of fashion. “You cannot do business if you do not know how to,” she says. Understanding the value chain, researching customers and developing a recognisable signature style are, in her experience, the ingredients of long-term survival. So are humility, professionalism and a willingness to learn, qualities she believes should come before ego. She has watched designers mature in their understanding of the commercial side of the work, including the discipline of delivering quality on time and making sound decisions.

None of this comes easily. Putting together SA Fashion Week carries real challenges, and funding remains a persistent worry. What keeps Booyzen going is her belief in the creative fashion industry’s potential, and the steady stream of evidence that the platform is doing what it set out to do: opening doors, locally and internationally, and helping designers take the next step.

By contrast with the drive that built the platform, she has also learnt, over the years, a harder lesson about when to step back. Booyzen can create opportunities, but each designer must make the most of them. Even when she sees enormous potential in someone, she has come to accept that they must find their own way. It is a philosophy of stewardship rather than control, and it shapes how she thinks about the future.

Ask her about the legacy she hopes to leave, and she is quick to deflect any talk of personal recognition. What she wants instead is for South Africa’s decision-makers to recognise the importance of developing the creative fashion industry. She believes designers should lead it, with manufacturing supporting their creativity rather than dictating its direction. “We will never develop our own identity if the fashion industry depends on manufacturing first,” she says.

That concern about identity runs through everything she says about the week just past. South African fashion, in her telling, is distinctive precisely because it draws on the country’s rich cultural diversity, and protecting that distinctiveness matters as much as any commercial gain. The full story of the event and its place in the industry’s evolution can be read at https://www.citizen.co.za/network-news/lifestyle/2026/11/01/beyond-the-runway-the-woman-championing-south-african-fashions-next-chapter/.

The runway, Booyzen acknowledges, is where the magic first catches the eye. But the real story, the one she has spent her career tending, unfolds long after the lights go down: in workshops and studios, in orders fulfilled and jobs created, and in messages from designers who found, because someone kept the doors open, a way forward.