London fashionistas strike their own path in Johannesburg

Preparing to move to Africa two years ago, the 26-year-old Londoner looked at her beloved pair of 6-inch gold platform shoes, sensing she might not get the chance to wear them again.

“But I packed them anyway,” Sharna Darko recalled.

Sister-in-law Louise Darko, meanwhile, took her entire 30-pair shoe collection.

A generation earlier, Sharna’s parents had left their home in Jamaica and Louise’s parents had departed their Ghana homestead to go to a land of opportunity: Britain.

But for the younger Darkos — best friends who share a taste in fashion and often raid one another’s closets — opportunity has come full circle. Both left good jobs in the London fashion world to move to Johannesburg, where fashion sense is not exactly cutting edge.

They thought that London, one of the world’s fashion capitals, was atrophying, with the recession snapping the branches of hope and stunting promising careers.

Still, landing in Johannesburg in 2009 was a shock.

It wasn’t just that as young black women, they were forced to confront South Africa’s strange and often alienating racial divide. It was also as simple as the fact that people walked so slooowly. The crowds traipsing lethargically through Johannesburg’s shopping malls reminded them of tourists in London who’d stop to look at everything, annoying the swifter, edgy commuters.

Even worse was the uninspired fashion sense and the woeful collections in big department stores. It was as if people had given up trying.

It would not do.

Sharna and Louise Darko, both now 28, grew up surrounded by swathes of brightly colored cotton that their mothers or grandmothers would sew into dresses for church and school.

Sharna’s favorite was a blue checked dress with frilly shoulders and a full ‘50s-style skirt. Louise remembers one particularly pretty melon-green skirt.

Louise got her love of color during her first trip to Ghana at age 10. “You’d see the women at the market in their colorful clothes, the colorful writing on the back of the taxis. Everywhere was color.”

Both eventually studied fashion — Sharna at the London College of Fashion and Louise at American Intercontinental University in Atlanta.

Louise, who also boasts a marketing degree, worked as a visual merchandiser, responsible for the look and layout of stores, at the fashion chain Ted Baker. Sharna was employed as a buyer for an online retailer, developing a raft of overseas suppliers.

“It was a ridiculously amazing job,” Louise said. “But the recession hit London.”

She avoided being laid off but “there was not much room to grow. You’d be stuck in the same job for years. I wanted to do what I was doing, but I wanted to do it for myself.

“If you can work that hard for somebody else and succeed, you can do it for yourself. There were no opportunities in London, not unless I was a millionaire.”

Most of Africa’s intercontinental migrant traffic still flows out rather than into it. About 30 million Africans live outside their home countries, according to the World Bank, which says pressure continues for migration to higher income countries led by Saudi Arabia, the United States and Britain.

The British pair decided on South Africa, partly because Sharna’s boyfriend (now her husband, who is also Louise’s brother) was studying there as a sound technician, and partly because they were convincedthat they could move up the ranks faster if they relocated.

Louise was hired as fashion marketer for a major retail store. Sharna, with a contact book full of suppliers, was hired by another major fashion store to help revamp their collection.

It didn’t go well.

Louise found that whites at company meetings would converse in Afrikaans. “I felt if I wasn’t a thick-skinned Londoner I probably would have left after six months.”

She hung on for a year and a half. When she was laid off last year, it was almost a relief.

“I don’t know how they saw this 12-year-old-looking black girl trying to tell them how to do their marketing. It was second nature to me but it was so out-there for them. I felt as if I was trying to teach them a foreign language.”

Sharna ran into the same sort of resistance.

“It was basically: ‘We have always done it this way, so why do we need to change?’ You walked into the store, and everything looked the same.”

Even shopping became a drag.

“We’d only shop if we really needed something, like if we were cold,” Sharna said.

The only answer: Start their own business.

They began at the bottom, cleaning out their closets, redesigning some items, and running a vintage clothing store at a popular Sunday market. They also developed a batch of skirts and shorts made from colorful West African fabric. Strong sales provided them the confidence and cash to develop their own fashion line and open their own store.

In April, MSC Boutique was born in a quaint storefront with an ornate pressed-metal ceiling rather like the surface of a huge wedding cake.

“The moment we opened the door and saw the ceiling, we said ‘This is character,’ ” Louise said.

The sisters-in-law specialize in vintage clothing, imports and their own colorful designs, which use some African fabrics.

“We definitely want the London look and feel, but we also want to incorporate the country we’re in,” Louise said.

People warned them that April — the beginning of Johannesburg’s winter — was the wrong time to launch.

“It’s been better than we thought it would be. The foot traffic is not the best, but we have driven our traffic a lot using social networking,” Sharna said.

Sometimes they still miss the buzz of London, the excitement of sizing up other fashionistas in the Tube on the way to work.

But they’re finding their way.

“Now, I walk slowly too,” Sharna said.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com

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