MaXhosa Africa aspires to cut a new pattern for luxury home and lifestyle living with the addition of décor tiles and cooler boxes.   

The fashion house’s ambitious plans to expand its lifestyle footprint will include the addition of ornate tiles and hand-crafted cooler boxes. Their current décor offerings include cushions, curtains and rugs with customisable patterning.  

The luxury brand collaborations are with local tile manufacturer Tile Africa and the wildly popular Capetonian Fields Bar.  

Set against the scenic backdrop of Zwartkops Raceway in Centurion, Pretoria, guests arrived to bellowing engines and sprinting motorcars swerving around tight hairpin bends with precision – perhaps signalling the luxury brand’s shift in gears.   

It was here at the lustrous and highly polished interiors of the Mercedes-Benz Advance Driving Academy that the fashion house gave guests an exclusive preview of the autumn-winter 2025 collection that debuted at Paris Fashion Week over a week ago.   

Evenly spaced-out poised mannequins entwined the various brilliant colour-ways and patterning from the autumn-winter collection titled Conviction. The denoted motif MXS ribbons tied the pieces together into a cohesive narrative.  

Admittedly, the menswear designer says he never set out to create womenswear initially, even though his debut Parisian presentation and uptick in sales had to do with women’s apparel.     

“Even though we started as a menswear brand inspired by Xhosa initiation, knitwear designs are embraced more by women,” explains founder and artistic director Laduma Ngxokolo.

“Making womenswear was not part of the initial plan. I only started doing womenswear in 2014 and showed up in Johannesburg. The reaction was great. Today, 65% of our sales are womenswear, so women have dictated our portfolio.” 

“You’re welcome,” host Unathi Nkayi interjected, draped in head-to-toe MaXhosa Africa.

It’s Ngxokolo’s swiftness to refashion his threads that has seen the expansion of the MaXhosa Africa franchise both locally and abroad. At present, his designs can be experienced at a pop-up store of Soho’s Canal Street in New York City as of February.   

“The way that we approached this collection was to make sure we cast our net as far wide as possible. In terms of colourways we stuck to our signature colours, however, this season we introduced purple and grey which make things more interesting in terms of our design possibilities,” he says. 

“We had a lot of sleepless nights before the [Paris Fashion Week] show and a lot of decisions that we had to make. And they are not solely based on how Laduma feels about a certain colour or design.

“My primary wish for the collection was to break the conservative barrier of SA fashion. I think we are not exploring enough when it comes to fashion expression. We are trying to break out of traditional and offer statement pieces and broadening our accessories bandwidth.”

Why Paris Fashion Week?  

“Paris is the LaLiga of fashion; it’s the highest level and I’ve always aspired to showcase at the highest level. We have been declined by the Paris Fashion Week jury a couple of times and it felt great [to finally show]. We were originally meant to do the show last year in September, however, the jury said ‘no’ and when they say no to you, it’s something that they took into thoughtful consideration. We learnt a lot from the process,” he says. 

“Paris Fashion Week has changed many designers’ careers. It’s not an easy platform to showcase on but what they want is consistency.”   

As a build-up to the second edition of the annual MXS Kulture Festival, the fashion show will feature an additional sixty looks to the Paris capsule. The music, food and lifestyle festivities are set to take place at the Sargent Family Hotel in Johannesburg. The festival first launched at the Nirox Sculpture Park last year.  

“The fashion show is the main part of the festival and we have not compromised,” Ngxokolo teases.  

“According to luxury trends, it is anticipated that buying goods will be obsolete in the future and people will buy into experiences. The festival is our way of setting ourselves up for the future, but we want to offer a 360 experience where we want to showcase culture from multiple angles.”