Beyond the Rainbow: Dali Ngcebetsha on Heritage, Metamorphosis and the Stories Fashion Carries

For his South African Fashion Week debut, designer Dali Ngcebetsha turned to his Xhosa heritage to tell a story about transformation, identity and the cultural knowledge we carry forward. In conversation with Nyaniso Tutu-Burris, he reflects on knowing where you come from, the responsibility of telling your own story, and what it means to preserve culture while making room for the future.

Some moments only reveal their significance after they’ve happened. At South African Fashion Week (SAFW) last Friday, I found myself seated in the front row of a show as a young man walked out in what looked to be a traditional Abakwetha blanket, and began to recognise the familiar looking print appearing across different looks. Then one of the models walked past close enough for me to see the print in greater detail. What I had initially read as a traditional Xhosa pattern was made up of butterflies. Some were small, others larger, and suddenly I could see them everywhere. The butterflies were also reflected in the silhouettes of some of the garments, bringing another dimension to the collection’s central idea: metamorphosis.

What I did not initially realise was that I was watching the debut collection of Dali Ngcebetsha, someone I have known for a decade. We first met in 2016, long before this moment, when he was beginning his fashion studies. A decade later, I was watching him introduce himself to the fashion industry on his own terms. The coincidence was not lost on either of us. As Dali put it, there were “less than a handful of people” who had seen him from the beginning of his journey to this point.

There was something particularly meaningful about witnessing it. Fashion Weeks present designers at the moment their work becomes visible to a wider audience, but the ideas behind a collection often develop privately, long before the runway. Dali told me he had thought about this collection three years before he felt ready to bring it to life.

“It’s more of a mental game that you play with yourself year after year,” he said. “I thought about this collection three years ago and it took me three years to actually feel audacious enough to pull it off.”

For Dali, the challenge was not simply creating the garments. It was finding the courage to introduce himself through them.

“I wanted to introduce myself through my roots, my heritage, and essence.”

That decision shaped the collection from its earliest ideas to its final look. Rather than treating his debut as an opportunity to demonstrate technical ability alone, Dali approached it as an introduction to who he is, where he comes from, and the stories he wants to tell.

The Story Before the Garment

Dali operates through Endless Dawn, the company he uses for projects across different creative fields, while his fashion work carries his own name. He describes Endless Dawn as representing continuous beginnings, a fitting philosophy for someone whose professional experience spans consulting, fashion and creative production. His SAFW debut marked a new chapter, bringing different parts of his experience together.

The collection centred on metamorphosis, drawing on the Xhosa rite of passage into manhood. Dali was deliberate about how he approached the subject, choosing not to expose its sacred elements through fashion. Instead, he told the story from the perspective of a mother preparing to release her son into the process and eventually receiving him back.

“The beginning of the script speaks to the mother packing all the clothes that the son used to have and putting them into boxes,” he explained. “Towards the end of the script, the mother’s now saying the mountain has kept its promise because now they can see the fully fledged child who is now a man in that context.”

Rather than reconstructing the initiation itself, Dali explored the transition surrounding it: the separation, anticipation and eventual recognition of the man his child has become.

“I just wanted to tell a story from an outsider’s perspective to preserve the sacredness of the culture itself, to basically tell the story from what happens before and what happens after.”

The narration was equally intentional. A live narrator backstage delivered the script Dali had written, guiding the audience through the story without revealing every part of it.

Visually, the collection developed through the imagery of the cocoon and butterfly. The garments moved through different colours and silhouettes. The butterfly motifs became more apparent as the collection unfolded, allowing the idea of transformation to emerge through the garments themselves.

Dali’s favourite look was a navy-blue outfit with a beaded butterfly collar, positioned around the middle of the 15-piece collection. He noted that the piece could easily have been used as the finale, but he deliberately positioned it in the middle of the show to show the middle of the transformation, the point at which change is underway but the journey is not yet complete.

He explained that the final look was intentionally more understated, reflecting a different stage of the story.

“It’s almost like I’m trying to give a matured version of someone that’s just completed something,” he said. “You might have studied, you got your degree, you got your certificate. But you haven’t yet applied yourself with the knowledge that you’ve now acquired.”

The Colours of the Rainbow Nation

South Africa often describes itself as the Rainbow Nation, a phrase associated with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the country’s transition into democracy. It is an image of coexistence, of people with different histories and identities belonging to a shared national future. But Dali’s collection raised an important question: what happens when the celebration of our collective identity makes it easier to overlook the distinct cultures that form it?

As Dali explained, South Africa’s diversity is one of its strengths. People move between languages, traditions and cultural influences in everyday life. A conversation at a shop counter can move through several languages without anyone stopping to announce the transition. Yet this fluidity can also make cultural distinctions less visible, particularly to those unfamiliar with the country’s different histories and communities. The Rainbow Nation can become a convenient shorthand for a much more complicated reality.

Behind each of our 11 languages are histories, communities, traditions and different ways of understanding the world. Our shared national identity does not make those distinctions less important. If anything, recognising the whole requires us to pay attention to the parts.

Dali’s decision to introduce himself through his Xhosa heritage was, in this sense, both personal and intentional. He wanted people to know where he came from, not because that was the only part of his identity, but because it was an important part of the person presenting himself to the world.

He noted that this choice also came from his experience of growing up in a generation where cultural identity can become a source of criticism. Dali spoke about the familiar accusations directed at black youth who attend private schools, become Westernised, or struggle to speak their mother tongue fluently: that they have lost touch with their roots, that they are not sufficiently connected to their heritage, or that they have become too removed from the communities they come from.

But these expectations can leave little room for the different ways people experience and maintain a connection to their heritage. Cultural identity is not a single, fixed experience, and fluency in a language or familiarity with every tradition cannot be the only measure of belonging. For Dali, the collection was an opportunity to make a public introduction grounded in his personal connection to his roots.

Tradition, Translation and the Future of Fashion

One of the most interesting aspects of Dali’s collection was its commercial accessibility. Its contemporary silhouettes brought the collection’s cultural references into everyday fashion, allowing the garments to exist beyond the runway without reproducing traditional dress.

Dali was clear that his intention was not simply to modernise a tradition or offer a reinterpretation for its own sake. He wanted to open new horizons, using the story of transformation to introduce himself and his creative perspective. Having experienced the initiation himself in the mountains of the Eastern Cape, he was drawing from a tradition that formed part of his own life.

“Me actually using the Xhosa rite of passage, I myself am Xhosa and I myself have gone through that initiation process,” he explained. “I used that as part of the collection because I wanted to show pride in where I come from, to introduce myself into Fashion Week as a designer.”

Translating cultural knowledge into fashion involves choices about what to share, what to protect and how to represent traditions without reducing them to their most visible elements. These considerations become particularly important when the cultural references carry sacred meaning, and when there may be different perspectives within a community about what should be preserved, adapted or shared.

Dali’s approach was informed by his own experience of the tradition, but also by an awareness of its boundaries. Rather than attempting to make the initiation itself visible, he drew on the transformation surrounding it to tell a story that was personal to him while preserving elements he felt should remain private.

For Dali, the story is central to his work. When I asked what he hoped would endure beyond the physical garments, he did not hesitate.

“I want people to remember the story,” he said. “In its truest essence, I am a storyteller.”

He wants people to connect with what he is thinking and recognise themselves in the stories he tells. The material matters, but it is not the only thing he hopes they will carry away from his work.

Dali describes working largely with private clients and producing one-of-one pieces, with commissions ranging from special-occasion garments to work for clients seeking something distinctly Afrocentric. He also spoke about paying attention to offcuts and the waste generated during production.

His wider practice raises questions about how fashion is made, what happens to leftover material, and what it costs to produce locally. Dali highlighted the financial pressures facing small and medium-sized designers who source, manufacture and distribute locally while competing with international businesses operating at very different scales. From fabric sourcing and sewing to packaging and distribution, these costs influence the final price of a garment, yet local designers are often compared with global retailers whose production models operate differently.

For Dali, understanding what goes into a garment is part of understanding its value. His debut collection asks us to consider another kind of value, too: the cultural knowledge, personal experience and storytelling that fashion can carry.

Sustainability Includes What We Choose to Carry Forward

At OneThread, our work is grounded in the idea that sustainability cannot be understood through a single measure. Our assessment framework examines ten pillars, including materials and sourcing, labour and production ethics, environmental impact, circularity, transparency and cultural stewardship.

Dali’s collection offers a way to explore that last pillar. Cultural sustainability asks how cultural knowledge, identity and heritage are preserved and carried forward. Narrative sovereignty asks who gets to tell a story, how it is represented, and whether the people whose lives and traditions are being described retain a meaningful place in that conversation.

Dali’s debut does not answer every question about sustainability, nor does it need to. It offers a personal example of cultural expression through fashion: a designer drawing on his own heritage, making deliberate choices about what to share, and creating contemporary work that invites people to engage with the story behind it.

Recognising cultural sustainability does not mean assuming that every traditional practice is inherently sustainable, or that cultural significance removes the need to examine how a garment is produced. It means making room for broader questions about what fashion carries, what it preserves, and what might be lost when we look only at the physical product.

Dali’s collection was an introduction, but also a declaration of pride. It began with a story he knew personally and opened a conversation about the relationship between heritage and contemporary fashion.

Ten years after I first met Dali, I found myself in the front row watching him tell a story about transformation. The butterflies emerged gradually, and the collection revealed itself one look at a time. It was a reminder that becoming is shaped by what we inherit, what we learn, and what we choose to carry forward.

Because the colours of the rainbow matter. And so do the stories that make each one distinct.