The Cutting Room Project aims to respond to Ilze Wolff’s book titled, ‘Unstitching Rex Trueform’ in which she analyses the impact on class, race and gender via the modernist architecture of the Rex Trueform garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town. This interactive storyboard explores how both in its design and cultural symbolism, ‘the three- piece suit’ addresses many of the same entanglements that Wolff’s research identified in the construction of the Rex Trueform building.

 

The proposed work, The Cutting Room Project: The Suit as Method and Mode – Decolonising Sites of Making and the Material Constructions of Identity responds to Ilze Wolff’s book titled ‘Unstitching Rex Trueform’ in which she analyses the impact on class, race and gender through the modernistic architecture of the Rex Trueform garment manufacturing factory in Salt River, Cape Town. This response follows on from my own research, which I (Lesiba Mabitsela) conducted for my MA dissertation in Theatre and Performance titled, ‘Performing Methods of Undress towards Re-Imagining African Masculine Identities’. My research primarily interrogated and critiqued the colonialist irony of contemporary African masculinities and their forms of performative representation. Both in its design and cultural symbolism, ‘the three-piece suit’ addresses many of the same entanglements that Wolff’s research identified in the construction of the Rex Trueform building. The Rex Trueform three-piece suit, known as one of quality, sophistication and good reputation, ties these two ‘objects’ together – both imbued with divisive notions of race, gender and class. The proposed work explores these entanglements through academic study, performative interventions, and the production of a micro-capsule collection, contributing towards new digital archives for forgotten stories and redress-ed possibilities.

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The collaboration between Wolff Architects and Lesiba Mabitsela Studios supported by the The African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI) brings the critique of dress and its wearing (in this case, the suit) into dialogue with a critique of the site of its making (in this case Rex Trueform as a heritage site in-the-making), and will contribute to each research field by drawing fashion theory, performance theory and architecture together through a collaboration with Wolff Architects and volunteering staff members from the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA).

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