I recently bumped into Sipho Mackenzie at a party. Although we’d met a few months before, I was so dazzled by Sipho’s look (the youngsters would call it a lewk) that I couldn’t immediately place him. Sipho, who had been relatively dressed down at our first meeting, was wearing an outrageously avant-garde outfit, with an oversized hat and sunglasses and a mix of traditionally masculine and feminine pieces layered over one another.
When people ask me what I like about living in Joburg, I often mention the fashion. There’s something about the way people wear clothes in this city that is not how people wear clothes in other cities…It’s hard to explain. But thanks to Sipho, I don’t need to explain it: His outfits are the embodiment of Joburg’s innovative, diverse, casual-but-also-intentional, in-your-face fashion scene.
As mentioned last week, I recently asked Instagram to give me Joburg blogging suggestions. One of my favorite responses was, “Please make interviews with ordinary Jozi people…Think about three questions you’ll ask everybody.” Although Sipho is anything but ordinary, he was one of the first people who came to mind when I decided to pursue this suggestion. This interview was a perfect excuse to talk to Sipho about his clothes.
I like the idea of asking each person only three questions — I think brevity is a good way to keep an ongoing project like this sustainable in the long term. But I struggled to be brief with Sipho; there was so much I wanted to talk to him about. I’ll do my best to keep this post brief though. The text below is only a small portion of the actual interview.
Interview with Sipho Mackenzie
Sipho is 24 years old and was born and raised in Mofolo North, Soweto, where he still lives.
Heather: What do you do?
Sipho: Right now I’m a master’s student in anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. I’m about to submit, which I’m excited for. I’m also a specialist/instructional designer at the Centre of Academic Technologies at UJ. We design short learning programs, like online programs.
Heather: What is your master’s about?
Sipho: My master’s is me challenging how the body is constructed, through fashion. Initially it started with me challenging the ideas of hegemonic masculinity. But as I did more fieldwork and research with people, I realized this concerns the body more than it concerns a specific gender.
I asked Sipho if there was anything in particular about his upbringing that got him interested in fashion, gender, and the body. He explained that he always loved fashion as a kid, and also that his older cousin — who he lived with and considers a brother — is gay. His brother was accepted and embraced in Sipho’s family, and when Sipho got older he was surprised by the stigma that existed around homosexuality outside his own home.
Sipho: At home, he had that freedom to just be who he is. The concept of coming out …I never knew that it existed. He just brought his boyfriend home one day and that was it.
When he left home, Sipho was also surprised by the social norms that existed around clothing and who was supposed to wear what.
Sipho: There’s a certain way men should dress and a certain way women should dress, and I didn’t really like it. I’d go to a retail store and see a blouse and say, oh, I like it. But there would be certain comments that no, this is for girls. So I started thinking to myself, what if I started to disrupt these emotions…through academia?
Heather: How did you get into fashion and how would you define your style?
Sipho: When I got to university in 2018, I met a friend called Fabric Nkumzi…He had these white Doctor Martens that I liked so much and his outfit was just perfect — so colorful. I asked him where do you buy your clothes and he said I’ll take you someday…So we went to the CBD, the central business district, to Madunusa [a huge second-hand clothing market]…We thrifted, and I got my first item. It was this jacket that was suede.
Sipho was nervous to wear his new jacket at first, because it was a big change in style for him, but he got great feedback when he finally did wear it. He and Fabric started thrifting regularly at the dunusas, finding second-hand and vintage pieces for as little as R5 (about $.30) each. He estimates that the outfit he was wearing during our interview cost R70 ($4). Sipho’s unique fashion aesthetic was born.
Sipho: I don’t know how to define my style…A few people have defined it as eccentric, or strange, but I don’t know really. I just dress up, I love expressing myself.
Heather: How do you curate your outfits?
Sipho: One thing I can tell you is that color is very important for me. When I pick my clothes, I make sure there are more light colors — bright, vivid colors — than dark colors…I’m a person who believes that with light colors, your mood just kind of brightens up…It kind of tricks my brain into saying, oh yeah, you know what, we’re in a happy mood today.
Heather: What do you think your clothes say about you?
Sipho: Am I allowed to be vulgar? [Yes.] That I don’t give a f*ck. For me, it’s actually deeper than it looks because we’re constantly told, do this, do that. This is how you dress, this is how you express yourself as a man. Whatever, you know? So basically my clothes say f*ck you to whoever has an opposing view about how people should express themselves…It’s a control thing, right?
Sipho mentioned that he considers it a privilege to be able to dress as he does in South Africa, compared to other countries like Uganda and Ghana that have repressive anti-homosexuality laws. “If I go to other countries, I can’t express myself like this because I could literally get killed.”
Sipho identifies as a straight man, but he believes gender is a social construct and doesn’t see his clothes as defining his gender or sexuality. “The way I dress sends a message that there’s not just black and white — there’s also gray.”
At the end of our interview, Sipho said something really interesting: “Men are constructed harshly.” I asked him to explain what he meant.
Sipho: Women can wear pants, and that’s okay. But as soon as a man wears a skirt, it’s like ohhhhhh, what’s going on? And for me it just shows this notion that men are not allowed to express themselves…They are not allowed space to cry, to be vulnerable, to be emotional…What does this fashion say about the overall construction of men?
But this does not erase the fact that men are also perpetrators. There’s two sides to this that we need to look into, but one does not have to erase the other one…We can look at men and feel sorry for them, and we can look at men and say you need to be held accountable for what you did.
Sipho said many more insightful things during our interview but I’m going to leave it at that. Sipho spends a lot of time interviewing other people for his anthropology fieldwork, and he told me it was really fun for him to talk about himself for a change. So this was a cool experience for both of us.
Follow Sipho on Instagram at @caden_kenzie.
Firstly I love this new project of yours _ “Jozi People” and good on Sipho for not “giving a shit” his dress sense is special and embracing of who he is – BRAVE, maybe a few more men should take a leaf from his book.
I totally agree! Hopefully some of them will 🙂
Young men like Sipho give me hope.
Me too 🙂
very cool!!! , I really appreciate seeing into a deep conversation and being able to see what he thinks on quite complex issues, very humanizing and portrayers clearly that there are kind people (and men) everywhere
Thank you 🙂
Absolutely obsessed with this!!! 🔥🙌🏽👏🏽
Thank you!