Growth Pattern

Cleo Droomer is putting in the work: excavating his heritage, evolving his creative practice, and producing a regenerative collection that restitches the rules of fashion design.

FASHION / CONVERSATION / 20.10.24

Read time / 18 mins

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Atop a three-storey building in District Six, Cleo Droomer’s studio is just big enough to house his fashion design essentials. Three industrial sewing machines have a sprawling view of the Cape Town skyline towards the ocean, so the space never feels cramped. Alongside a shelf stocked with deadstock fabric and a rail of clothing-in-progress, a large cutting table fills at least a quarter of the 40 square metre room. On a chilly July morning, all routes around the table are occupied by the Re-stitching District Six documentary crew and their film equipment. Watching from a corner behind the door, I count eight people, three cameras and one large boom microphone.

All eyes and lenses are on Cleo and Dr Nadia Kamies, a History PhD whose grandmother was forcibly removed from this very area along with 60 000 others by the Apartheid government in the ’70s. She’s teaching Cleo to crochet — a skill that takes some practice to master, and looks a bit like using chop sticks with both hands. The goal of crocheting a doily will need to be achieved later, off camera.

Cleo remarks on a major shift in his perception of doilies, from an everyday object in his childhood home to the manifestation of a craft that came to South Africa via the 17th century Indian Ocean slave trades. This ‘poor man’s lace,’ as it has become known colloquially, is a tangible connection to Cleo and Nadia’s ancestral identity. Nadia will tell me later that befriending Cleo on this project has developed her research into a tactile realm. Through their interaction with these historically charged objects, “we’re talking about history by making it alive and bringing it into the present.”

Cleo rides the particularly snug elevator (with a max capacity of five people, though three is more realistic) to his studio in Cape Town’s District Six.

A patchwork jacket basks in the winter morning light.

Above this tonal thread collection, Cleo’s in-studio altar includes fresh flowers and power objects: “Creating a sacred space within your workplace is a really important practice for me.”

Cleo takes an unlined jacket off the rail: it’s a patchwork of sturdy cottons and crochet panels he’s stitched from fabrics sourced at a nearby thrift store. Director producers Antoinette Engel and Ayesha Mukadam’s Re-stitching District Six, planned for a 2026 release, will show this jacket and other pieces come to life as Cleo collaborates with master craftspeople: ex-residents from the neighbourhood, some of whom are now in their nineties. Today, Cleo and Nadia are sewing her grandmother’s doilies onto the jacket. For an added layer of meaning, they’re using a blueish grey thread, naturally dyed with objects Cleo foraged from the still barren district’s slopes. The objects include protea, fennel, and rusted iron, an effective fixative. Nadia suggests summarising this process on a label inside the jacket.

“Handle with care. Do not tumble dry,” Cleo chuckles, to which Nadia chime-laughs in agreement. “I think that’s a great idea. I’m gonna make labels.”

The making aspect of fashion design is Cleo’s core creative motivator. A week before the documentary shoot, the HOMEY crew flits around his studio with their own equipment to produce visuals for this story. “I geek out on pattern making,” the designer shares. “You’re testing and trialling over many iterations, trying to come to the perfect prototype. For me, that process is quite exciting.”

“I don't just work with fabric and fashion. I work with history, with memory and the intangible.”

Cleo’s defining features are a gentleman’s grooming trifecta: a full, tightly sculpted beard, thick moustache and powerful eyebrows. Topped off with a signature black beanie to match, Cleo embodies a self-actualised creative energy that might intimidate if it wasn’t animated by his profoundly gentle nature. Cleo channels a sense of peace in his studio, his intellectual generosity and warm demeanour an unintended decoy from his rigorous approach to garment construction and quality. Talking through the production rail, we’re shown how jacket sleeves are always wider than shirt sleeves to ensure ease of layering. And since buttons aren’t easily recyclable, Droomer garments favour fabric fastenings.

Technical specifications are always matched by a compelling narrative. Cleo is holding a cropped pair of cream wide leg jeans, stitched with wavy panels of darker blue denim. “These are from my favourite pairs of jeans that I owned in my twenties,” he explains. “I really wanted to memorialise them, so they became what turned out to be a sort of Friesian cow denim patch trouser, which I kinda love.”

Cleo made these jeans with the same industrial sewing machines he’s lugged across three provinces over a fifteen-year career. He bought them shortly before his industry debut as a bright-eyed fashion design graduate, winning the ELLE Magazine and Mr Price apparel New Talent competition in 2010. In response to the theme of Hope, that collection was inspired by the multifaceted nature of South Africa and its people. The concept was visually represented in the collection by a custom print that evokes the glistening interior of a Perlemoen (abalone) shell. Looking at the kaleidoscopic print on assertive puff shoulder jackets and peplum dresses, you’d never guess its starting point was the South African flag. Remixed with intentionally cliché photography of local landmarks, liquified, mirrored and tined to a soft pastel, Cleo translated the country’s ultimate symbol of hope into a fashionable motif.

Cleo’s library of pattern blocks hang neatly on standby. These “form the outline for what you’re gonna cut in your fabric,” Cleo explains. “You’ve got to understand how a line translates onto a body in 3D.”

During his corporate eras, Cleo always had a home design studio. “I guess like a reminder that there’s still this part of you that exists, and you’ve got to feed it.”

In ELLE’s December 2010 issue, fashion director Chris Viljoen recalls the moment that locked in Cleo’s win. At the end of his judging session, Cleo removed a pastel PVC jacket from its model, opening the piece up like a Perlemoen shell to reveal a lining that had been quilted in the pattern of his print. “I realised that I’d actually placed my hand on my heart,” Chris wrote in his ELLE Insider column. “When I looked to my right, I saw Amber Jones of Mr Price had misty eyes. We knew we had some magic here.”

And then the real work began. Cleo would spend the majority of the next decade in Johannesburg working for household-name corporate fashion brands, all the while keeping his personal design studio alive and stitching. It set the tone for Cleo’s career where, as the pendulum swings between the personal and commercial, he continuously levels up by distilling and implementing the best aspects of his current projects. By 2017, Cleo moved home to Cape Town, channelling a wealth of corporate knowledge into reestablishing his brand.

“Cleo’s story is quite unique, not only in South Africa, but the world,” says Jackie May. “Who else is telling this particular story, using this medium with such authenticity and integrity? It’s incredibly powerful.”

The business of South African fashion design is challenging at best and lethally uncharted at worst; disappearances are far more common than comebacks. This made it all the more exciting when Cleo presented his Autumn Winter 2017 collection at Africa Fashion International’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Cape Town, which famously had to be evacuated on account of Camps Bay’s gale force wind.

The collection, shown in its entirety before the venue got swept up, heralded a new era of Droomer: a minimalist lineup of ageless, sporty pieces with a streetwear attitude. Chris attended the show as creative director of the online retailer Spree (now Superbalist). DMing me today, he remembers looking around at the women in the audience. “You could see them styling the collection like, ‘I’ll wear that trench over those trousers’.” The collection resonated with local buyers, influencers and critics alike. It felt like Cleo had evolved into his highest form.

But he was just getting started.

As the world went into COVID-19 lockdown, work-from-home tranquillity allowed for a necessary corporate detox: daily meditation and firing up those sewing machines spurred a reconnection to Cleo’s love of craft. When his grandmother, a dressmaker and fierce matriarch, passed away during the highest stage of lockdown, his grief prompted the personal heritage excavation that would permanently alter his creative practice.

A Droomer garment is designed and constructed to leave the lightest carbon footprint possible. From an aesthetic point of view, it must transcend seasonal trends. “Longevity is very important to me,” Cleo says.

Although Cleo has recently employed a tailor and design assistant, the business of Droomer is a one man show, with Cleo heading up every operation from design to fabric sourcing, production, marketing, selling, and everything in between.

Cleo began stitching together inherited materials, creating heirloom textiles from his grandfather’s ties and fabric swatches from his grandmother’s haberdashery. “I never meant to go that deep with it, but the more you inquire and the more you start probing, the more you start digging and pulling out things. The family albums came out, the family tree came out, and it became like this Sherlock Holmes investigative journey on a pinboard in my studio: really deeply enquiring about my ancestry, like, who are so-called coloured people in South Africa?”

Cleo shows me a photo of his paternal great, great grandfather from Rotterdam in the 1800s. He has traced two slave ancestors back to his maternal grandmother, as well as Khoi relatives on his maternal grandfather’s side, six generations back. “I really wanted to understand more about what lives in our body: what is the cellular memory that’s passed down from generation to generation?”

“This inquiry is helping me find a sense of identity in a space where identity had been stripped away,” Cleo explains. Addressing his ancestors’ fraught history head-on has proved cathartic: “Thinking about the Group Areas Act, the immorality act, and further back to slave legislations, you garner a better understanding of the circumstances entire generations had been raised in.”

“I’ve spent a lot of my career doing things for the sake of doing things. Now I want to do things because they actually mean something.”

Through the process of regenerative making (more on that later), Cleo used his heirloom textiles to create three puffer vests he named “(Life) Jackets”. At the intersection of meticulous craft and poignant research, these pieces transcend designer clothing, and are better considered somewhere between couture and fine art sculpture. The intention, for them to “keep these haunted histories and ancestral conversations afloat,” proved successful when, in true Cleo style, his work was met with resounding acclaim at the 2022 Twyg Sustainable Fashion Awards.

Droomer won the Innovative Design and Materials Award, as well as the ceremony’s pinnacle prize, the Changemaker Award. “Cleo’s scores were very high,” confirms Twyg founder Jackie May. “The judges left comments that acknowledged the designer’s low impact, unique design (reversible, gender-fluid pieces), skills-intensive and immaculate handiwork.” His research around transatlantic and the Afro-Asiatic slave trade was also submitted: “The research findings of what it means to make the thing are as important as the thing itself,” says Cleo. He co-authored the academic paper, Flotation Devices, with his partner, Dr Dylan McGarry in 2023, and is laying the groundwork for a master’s degree abroad.

“I love the idea of things not standing out from the natural world too much,” Cleo says of his colour inclinations, flanking a dress form and rolls of pattern making paper in a jacket from his new collection.

In his tactile, organic design process, Cleo takes construction cues from his materials: “Once I start working with the fabric, I can really get a feel for what it wants to become.”