Floyd Manotoano draws on a rich subcultural knowledge for his menswear label Floyd Avenue.
He was a key member of The Smarteez – a group of four DIY, menswear designers, whose flamboyant suiting is credited with helping usher in a new movement in art, music and fashion in the Soweto township in Johannesburg.
Today, Manotoano recalls his family’s initial trepidation at his interest in fashion. “Coming from Soweto, we were not from a very privileged background,” he says.
“So to work in the creative industry? People starve in the creative industry, and you didn’t want to be that person – which is why I studied engineering.”
He soon left his studies for fashion, and has now worked in the industry for well over a decade.
Manotoano approaches his clean, unfussy menswear collections intuitively, with every piece leading organically to the next.
There’s a natural evolution: a denim jacket designed with a bicycle commute in mind leads him to designing a denim tailcoat.
He laments the lack of fabrics available in South Africa, while also conceding that laborious sourcing is at the root of his design process. “It’s hard to get good fabrics in South Africa,” Manotoano says.
“We get everything that the rest of the world doesn’t want. So you really need to go out and search. I search for the fabric first, and then the story tells itself.”