"The Prince Of Cotton"



Creativity is an unspoken language of the world, it's one where the creator/artist expresses him or herself in song, paintings, sculpting and many more...


Mozart had music, Einstein had mathematics, Picasso had art, Michael Jackson had dance and I have garmentry, a form I’ve chosen to express myself with. It has become my language of elegance through a dialect of class, a language where Silk is a proper noun, muslin is a common noun (everyday person place or thing), buttons play the role of conjunctions whilst every stitch of thread sewn is an adjective which links the nouns to form the perfect sentence.


I was born in Benoni, South Africa, to a fashion conscious father and a fashion forward mother, and an uncle whose sense of fashion is implacable and goes unsurpassed. I’m not sure if that’s where I subconsciously got it from but I remember that at the age of 12 all I could dream about was loafers and fitted cotton shirts wrapped in tailored jackets with velvet lapels, all in shades of blue, pink, red and yellow. I’d always wake up with a smile on my face which was wiped away by the drag and limitations of the then formal education system.


By the age of 13 I had created an image around myself and started choosing my threads similar to the way one chooses their words to construct a sentence.

You are what you wear and what you wear can tell everybody around you what it is that’s on your mind. The larger my closed got, the better my "vocabulary" became.

By 16 the dream had grown to a vision of dressing the world like Tatenda Sipula. My mind was constantly spacing out to find a new way of materialising this vision on a shoe string budget, so my amateur creativity aided in branding anything I could get my hands on, anything that represented "the image", from caps to cigars I made sure anything I touch could be viewed from any angle and each time it looked unmistakably Tatenda Sipula.

Today the brand identity continues to take shape and form, but my thinking patterns are like second nature. Innovation and creativity only serve to bring it alive by giving it a more refined and sophisticated look.


BA. Fashion Design (SOFA Manila)

MBA Luxury Brand Management (IFA Paris)