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SimoneDragonfly

@simonedragonfly

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AW26 Zero Waste Capsule Collection
Knot A Loose End
Sustainable South African Fashion Designer
a natured niche

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Something old…🧶

Every now and then, the present requires us to peer into the past. Fiddle around with your moms wedding dress, excavate your late grandfather's sunday best or adorn yourself in your grannies pearls (which as a child you thought were tacky, ghastly and relics of the ‘olden days’).
What we find often is that when we wear what we remember, more than just our sense of style becomes illuminated. Instead we are better equipped and scaffolding our gratitude for current trends and offering up a living body of archival narration.
Before the finished garment, there was the first stitch. The imperfect prototype. The silhouette that taught us what to reconsider, what to release and what was worth carrying forward.
These are the garments that raised SimoneDragonfly. Our growing pains, our building blocks, our lessons sewn into cloth. Not every piece was made to sell, but just like the something old, everything was intentionally crafted to stay.
Brought out of the archives and into the light at Afrikan Freedom Station, these old stories found new bodies, new movements and new meaning. A gathering of emerging local talent, reminding us that no creative practice grows in isolation, and no future is built without the hands that crafted before.
Because sometimes, to understand what we are becoming, we must first honour what brought us here.
Something old. A little of what we were, carried into all that we may become.
Modelled by: @stacysmom._ @uncle_grandpaaa @bethany.leaman @sandy_mkhize262 @fezii.n
Photographed by: @stacysmom._ & @simonedragonfly by @simonedragonfly

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3 days ago

It’s all in the details: Every element has a reason. Every detail, a purpose.

At SimoneDragonfly, we believe nothing does exist on a garment simply as a decorative appendage. A tie is not merely a tie. It is a closure, a drawcord, an invitation to adjust, gather and transform. Binding is not simply a finish; it strengthens a garment, protects its edges and elements from erosion and erasure, therein extending its life.

When we speak about multifunctional design, we are thinking beyond more than one way to wear it. We are engage how a garment can respond to the body, change with it and remain useful beyond a single moment, season or silhouette. Our patterns are drafted with volume, flare and, at their centre, ease.

In fine tether: The Pome-Gathered Skirt is designed to fit between a size 34–48, with a waistband extending up to 220cm. Its two front drawcords allow the wearer to adjust the length, while creating ruffles, ruching and new forms along the way.

Playful, romantic and intentionally undone, the skirt carries more than one possibility within its shape. Gather it. Draw it. Lengthen it. Shorten it. Let it fall.

Because a garment should not dictate the body it belongs to. It should leave room for the body to become and stay becoming 🪟🎐

Designed with intention. Made with possibility. Worn in multitudes 🪢 taken in South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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2 months ago

It’s all in the details:

Intentional design prioritizes quality over quantity. Choosing well crafted garments that are designed and made to last rather than an abundance of mass produced pieces.
We make only 3 - 4 units per item. We focus our efforts on planning, prototyping and perfecting our designs instead of a large production of items.

SimoneDragonfly pieces nurture both the planet and the people who inhabit them. Our approach emphasizes the use of zero waste pattern construction to reduce the creation of textile waste in the making of our garments. This is our small contribution made now to preserve our tomorrow.

Fruits of our layer: The Baobab Bibs pattern pieces fit together like a puzzle, utilizing every piece of the fabric. This ensures there is no fabric waste created in the cutting process. There are only 4 Baobab Bibs made and the exact fabric cannot be sourced again. We created 4 very special fabric sculptures with delicate craftsmanship. taken in South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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2 months ago

It’s all in the details 🕊️🫒
Trends are fleeting. But a garment designed with intention is timeless.
At SimoneDragonfly, we are interested in garments that move with you rather than asking your body to move around them. Pieces that shift, drape, fold and unfold with changing needs, holding their own form while making room for yours ⏳
Because a garment is more than what the eye sees.
It is the weight of a fabric against the skin. The way it gathers when you move. The texture beneath your fingertips. The quiet architecture of a seam. The space it creates between body and cloth.
This is why our fabric choices are considered as carefully as our silhouettes. We favour natural fibres not only for their material qualities, but for the sensory relationship they create between garment, wearer and environment.
Tie Olive the Knots: The Asymmetrical Shirt is crafted from 100% double cotton muslin, a fabric with a subtle crepe texture that catches light, creates dimension and softens the relationship between structure and movement.
It is not a one-look-fits-all garment. It is a piece of a larger conversation: worn alone, layered with others, tied, untied, gathered and reimagined.
Because multifunctional design is not about making one thing do everything.
It is about understanding that every piece has multitudes and that those multitudes become more meaningful in union.

Wear it. Feel it. Tie it. Untie it. Make it yours. taken in South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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2 months ago

Come hear here...

In a world that celebrates the individual and in turn glorifies individualism. We chose to celebrate the collective. The union even in its separateness.

Knot A Loose End is the love child bred by two artists, old neighbours, in past lives two ragged sisters and in the current the bearers of two practices. Pattern and narrative. Garment and gesture. The scaffolding between and the tethers thereafter.
The making of this project I suppose (not to be redundant) was the...making of this project. There were collaborations untouched and moodboards half arsed. Phone calls dragged on by hooting and hollering. Day jobs to attend to that both somehow aided the fruition of this collection.

Each discipline and practitioner thereof, has stretched towards the other, refusing the idea that creation happens in isolation.

Because fashion has always been collaborative. It belongs to the weaver, the seamstress, the photographer, the wearer and the storyteller alike.

Like every knot in this collection, this collaboration reminds us that strength is never found in a single thread, but in those willing to be woven together.

Artists: @stacysmom._ @simonedragonfly @jpeg_jermain by @simonedragonfly

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3 months ago

AW26 Zero Waste Capsule Collection Knot A Loose End is our winter offering that explores connection through knots fastened and ties released.
This collection celebrates, commemorates and constructs garments that call for the wearer’s constant participation and interaction, to tie, to tighten, to close, to bring together. Our garments showcase their individual story, their tapestried identities and worn together, express an interconnected narrative. A story that still bares the comfort of an ending but belongs to so much more. So we hope you enjoy witnessing and engaging this collection half as much as we enjoyed weaving it for you, because we had a ball 🧶
Only real clothing is gonna last. All those other bullfits are here today and gone tomorrow.

Discover the lookbook in our bio! 💌
Modelled by: @stacysmom._
Video by: @jpeg_jermain by @simonedragonfly

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3 months ago

Come hear here...

Every knot tells two stories.
One of what has been held together. Another of what has been allowed to come undone.
For generations we have understood that tying is never simply fastening. It is gathering. Mending. Carrying. Passing from one pair of hands to another. A quiet reminder that nothing made with love, intention and care is ever truly finished.
Knot A Loose End is an invitation to return to this way of gauging our gaps. The gap between self and other, where we come from and what’s been archived of that experience. It seeks to scaffold something that feels missing or far or intangible.
To tie and untie. To push and pull. To gather and release.
The act of submission and resistance as tools to bind together rather than separate.

Each garment drapes and draws open like the curtains to the home that is our body, revealing that what appears to separate us is often only a trick of the eye. Every gap holds the possibility of being filled. Every loose thread carries the promise of another knot.
Like the Baobab, we begin at the root—where memory, community and craft are held.
Like the Olive, we reach outward—bridging distance with open hands, breaking bread before breaking barriers.
Like the Pomegranate, we gather the fruits of our labour, usually a labour of love. The scatterlings of seeds that bare knowledge, so that what we inherit may continue to grow long after we are gone.

This collection is not interested in perfection. It is interested in participation.
In resisting the idea that clothing is disposable, disconnected or without memory. In remembering that what we wear has always reflected more than ourselves—it reflects the hands that stitched it, the stories that shaped it and the communities that continue to carry it.
Because fashion has never simply been about dressing the body.
It has always been about tying ourselves back to one another.

Modelled by: @stacysmom._ & @simonedragonfly
Photographed by: @jpeg_jermain taken in South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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3 months ago

Come hear here: Knot A Loose End pt3

Every fruit is the continuation of the trees story.
The Pome-Gathered Skirt is a romantic play on femininity and fertility; a soft sculpture that invites the wearer to interact with the garment. It asks the wearer to imbue their own meaning, to play it into their own creation.
The pomegranate is an ancient embodiment of fertility, of abundance. A symbol that traces back to before the earth had four seasons. The pomegranate strives to continue its legacy, this life-death-life cycle. It is the desire to produce something both like yourself and greater than yourself.
Some believe that the pomegranate is the original fruit from the original tree.
Our mitochondrial DNA holds heritage, knowledge, wisdom and history and is passed down from mother to daughter. This uninterrupted female lineage traces all the way back to the original branch of our family tree; The first fruit, our creation that we pass down. Our story continues. taken in South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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Come hear here: Knot A Loose End pt2

Every tree stretches beyond its roots. If the Baobab teaches us where we come from, the Olive reminds us how we arrive before one another. An outreach, an extension, a welcoming, an embrace. There are two things the olive gives to us; first is a core. Its flesh consumed leaves its true worth in its capacity to use what remains as its legacy. The second is its heritage; the manifestation of reuniting bonds and repairing the earth cracked and scorched around it.

Tie Olive the Knots: The Asymmetrical Shirt is the extension of this story. It does not close with certainty, nor does it seek perfect symmetry. Instead, it wraps, folds and drapes—like garments that have travelled across generations and continents. Like the sari. Like the kimono. Garments that understood the body long before fashion taught it to conform.
An olive branch has never simply been a branch. It is an offering. A gesture that says, come closer. Let us bridge what has been separated. Let us restore what has come undone.
To tie olive the knots is to resist the spaces that illuminates our disconnection from one another. From the hands that stitched our clothing, from the land that grew its fibres, and from the stories woven into every seam. Breaking bread and offering an olive branch has never been about food. It is about making room, shifting and contouring into asymmetrical figures so there’s space for more imperfection as a table that celebrates it. It is the act of recognising that a table grows stronger the more people it gathers.

Our garments ask the same of us.
To loosen the knots of consumption. To untie the distance between maker and wearer. To wear not only what reflects us, but what reconnects us.
Because clothing, too, can be an act of reconciliation. taken in Johannesburg, South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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We’ve been playing around. Prototyping. Pleating. Producing. Practicing. And most importantly, all this has culminated into a product. Or products 🤫

This is the final insert in our ‘THE PROTOTYPE IS THE PRODUCT’ series. A journey that required the @simonedragonfly team to take steps backwards. Back into our initial vision, back to the drawing, draping and designing board. Through this endeavour we have not only had the time, creative capacity and drive to build something a new. But more importantly we had the vision to look at the old and do so with fresh eyes 🔎🥽

@simonedragonfly
@stacysmom._ taken in Johannesburg, South Africa by @simonedragonfly

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4 months ago

Sometimes the prototype is the product.

In a fashion landscape increasingly inundated with buzzwords, we often forget that sustainability is not always about moving forward. Sometimes it asks us to glance backwards. Towards the tannies, nanis, mothers and seamstresses who understood that where there is thread, there is possibility. Where there is material, there is a million ways to tie, knot, re-work and re-wear.

This prototype styling series is rooted in that very philosophy. The understanding that fashion, before it became industry, was utility, creativity and community intertwined. That the process is just as important as the final garment. That what may appear to be excess, offcuts or gaps could simply be reimagined differently.

At SimoneDragonfly, we wear what we make because these pieces were never designed for perfection. They were designed for practicality, purpose and expression. Every garment we’ve sewn, sold or showcased has existed as something equally as beautiful long before it was lookbooked, packaged or price tagged. taken in Johannesburg by @simonedragonfly

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5 months ago