Twyg Fashion Festival

Fashion out of the studio and into the city

The Twyg Fashion Festival ran across central Cape Town in February 2026. It is programmed by Twyg, the Cape Town non-profit media platform that has worked on sustainability through fashion, textiles and design since 2019, and whose Slow Fashion Festivals sit alongside its awards, repair workshops and reporting. Over four days the festival moved through a cathedral, a run of city-centre studios and shopfronts, a street show on Bree Street and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

Progression V at St George's Cathedral

The anchor was Progression V, an immersive performance by fashion artist Onesimo Bam, produced and co-directed by Tandekile Mkize, staged in St George's Cathedral on Thursday 19 February from four until six in the afternoon. It was the first fashion performance of this scale and nature in the 160-year-old building, the oldest cathedral in southern Africa.

Progression V continues Bam's Progression series, which works from the belief that clothing is shaped by the body rather than the body conforming to clothing, and which asks who is granted visibility, who occupies the platform and who decides what fashion looks like. Responding to the cathedral's architecture, acoustics and spiritual resonance, the thirty-look collection reimagined heavenly bodies through structure, form and material, with the sacred space as both stage and collaborator.

Central to the performance was a collaboration with the Langa St Cyprians Anglican Church Choir, who performed alongside artist Uno July and pianist Ntando Ngcume. The cast included Zizipho Poswa, Andile Dyalvane, Nondi Beattie and Daniel Sher, alongside new faces and friends of the label.

Through the inner city

Around the cathedral show the festival worked the streets. A walking tour on 21 February took visitors between designer studios and shopfronts in the city centre. Fuata Moyo staged a show powered by Vault on Bree. In Circulation, a newsstand for responsible fashion, ran at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair at the CTICC from 20 to 22 February, and carried on afterwards into an after party.

Our part in it

Progression V was staged with support from Mission for Inner City Cape Town, Merchant's on Long and the V&A Waterfront.

The festival is programmed by Twyg, not by Mission for Inner City. The figures above describe the festival programme.