Cape Town Kwassa Kwassa: A menswear guide

MANILA, Philippines - Oh no, they’re on to us,” says our tour guide, a marketing guy from a theater company, who played one-man hospitality team to our hapless group of tourists. “There are so many of them here. I detest them,” he says. Count on the theater guy to bring a bit of drama, of course.

Before I can get a word in edgewise, he puts his hand over my mouth: “You can’t say that dirty word here! These people will hear you. You can’t say the h-word!” “H-word” of course, being “hipster” and “here” being Cape Town, South Africa.

In less than a week of being in Cape Town, I was struck by how un-Africa it was — at least very much unlike the Africa in my head, or the Africa in The Wild Thornberrys. It seemed like a strange amalgam of Berlin (the bars, the galleries, heart of the city), an Italian town (waterfront postcards from either town is interchangeable), Napa Valley (those famous vineyards), and the Africa in pop culture (hence, African penguins on the beach, a chance to run with cheetahs, safari just an hour away, etc, etc.). So much so that at some points, you can get a deep blue ocean, a tribe performing “Graceland”-like hymns on the street, grotesquely overgrown plants, a hipster with a hard-on for chambray, and the famous Table Top Mountain all in one frame.

It’s a worldwide epidemic, ‘stache-growing, Grizzly Bear-loving overgrown boys in pedal pushers “worshipping at the Church of Zooey” (Deschanel), according to our rancorous tour guide. It’s a Cape Town epidemic I had been told about earlier in the trip, when I met a charming chocolatier-slash-PhD student named Naomi at an artisanal chocolate shop. “There’s a bit of a community here,” she said. “It’s beginning to feel like Berlin.”

You can do a lot worse than Berlin, I think. And one man’s epidemic is another man’s episcopacy. It seems the H-word has at least brightened up some aspects of local culture, evident in their nightlife scene (those mason jars don’t pay for themselves, you know), their retail scene, and yes, artisanal chocolate shop scene (sorry, Naomi, but “artisanal chocolate shop”). Cape Town’s menswear offerings, I found, were frequently inspired, whether it be in concept or the garments themselves.

Loading bay

One of the best experiences I had in Cape Town was dining and shopping at Loading Bay, a brunch place with a retail extension. The food is good enough alone — with an impressive array of breakfast staples and burgers. And the ambience is icing on an already sweet cake, natural light, a lot of wood, and artfully exposed beams helping make this a local favorite (and much to our tour guide’s disappointment, the bourgeois hipster hangout).

But the retail half of the place really ups the ante. Housing brands like Acne and APC, magazines like Monocle and Acne Paper, it creates a seamless environment — a retail space that trades on style as a lifestyle instead of a blind chasing of trends. This is style that goes through the way you eat, what you read, and how you dress.

“Our country has been dominated by mall fashion shopping, generic shopfronts, and a lack of risk,” explains Jon-Paul Bolus, co-founder and creative director of the store and incidentally, one of GQ South Africa’s Best Dressed Men. Bolus and his partners wanted to create an alternative to high-end shopping but in an environment that felt organic. “I found a neighborhood that had the potential and the qualities to become a solid community… There was a lack of these kinds of communities, but it seemed the market was hungry for something new.”

It seems Loading Bay has been instrumental in creating that. De Waterkant is a thriving center of culture, with independent coffee shops (including the must-try Origin coffee shop), galleries, and increasingly forward-thinking boutiques mushrooming around the neighborhood.

30 Hudson Street, De Waterkant, Cape Town

Spaghetti mafia

Giovanni Colle moved from Italy to Cape Town a few years back and felt the urge to introduce Italian brands to the burgeoning local market. Like Loading Bay, Spaghetti Mafia is a boutique. But unlike Loading Bay, and contrary to the shop name, it doesn’t serve food. Heck, not even spaghetti.

But there’s no use being disappointed. There’s much to celebrate here. Housing the best and brightest of the younger Italian brands and collaborating with local designers for capsule collections, Colle has curated an impeccable menswear boutique.

The best part of Mafia, though, is the little surprises they have. Colle doesn’t necessarily believe in following the seasons, sometimes selling garments that have gone out of stock years ago. For example, he’s kept a considerable stock of the Raf Simons x Fred Perry collaboration from a few years back (“I kind of bought a lot”) and has been selling them staggered, meaning you’ll find a lot of decently-priced rare pieces in the boutique you can only probably find on eBay for 10 times the price.

199 Loop Street, Cape Town

Adrian Kuiters

Keith Henning is an industrial designer who’s always loved the impeccable tailoring of the 1950s and lamented some of the lackluster tailoring around him. Despite being an industrial designer by trade, he started a boutique in 2011, applying his design aesthetic to menswear, which might explain why the structure of the clothes at Adrian Kuiters is often strong and inspired.

Named after his globetrotting grandfather, Adrian Kuiters has since become one of Cape Town’s leading names in menswear. The garments aren’t ostentatious or too hip. If anything, Henning strips them of artifice, concentrating instead on elegant construction and classic style.

“I don’t see my work as fashion but as another form of product design,” he once said. “So I approach it the same way, creating timeless items that people can wear through seasons and through trends, and which will last you in terms of quality.” Adrian Kuiters shares its retail space with Take Care, by all accounts, an expression of the same sentiment but for women.

73 Kloof Street, Cape Town