Dress Review: David Tlale
David Tlale's orange chiffon dress with gold coins seems to achieve the impossible: it is form-fitting yet fluid. The top is a charcoal and gold-colored metallic jacquard sheath, while orange, Grecian-style drapery flows organically from the models' shoulders to her ankles. Bright coins adorn the front. According to Tlale, the coins are real and were custom-minted with his name and year on it, exhibiting an attention to detail that is typical of the meticulous, yet passionate designer's fashions. The dress was part of Tlale's Climate Change Couture Collection which launched during Africa Fashion Week at the South African Mint factory in 2011.
The vision for the dress began when Tlale was approached by the South Africa Mint to collaborate on an environmental awareness campaign. The Mint developed the coins and medallions minted with Tlale's name on it in his honor. Tlale is the first fashion designer in South Africa to have a commemorative medallion minted with his name, one of the greatest honors of his ten-year career.
The dress is meant to symbolize fire, one of the side-effects of climate change. However, in addition to its symbolic importance, it also has a rare quality of merging the sophisticated with the primal in its colors and lines. It is simple and flattering yet also volcanically sexual. Indeed, Tlale says that he deliberately draped the chiffon to make it appear like an overflow of volcano, while the metallic fabric and coins represent dried-up ash.
Tlale says that he designs his dresses to be worn by women of all body types.
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