The Cloth Remembers

Join Twyg and CPUT's Fashion Department for an afternoon with Nuraan Petersen and founder of Sway Studio, Shaakira Jassat, at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town.

Nuraan Petersen is a senior lecturer, practice-led design researcher and educator working at the intersection of fashion, material culture and decolonial design. Her research explores how textiles, dress and adornment carry histories of migration, memory and belonging across the Indian Ocean world, with a particular focus on Cape Malay identity and material heritage in South Africa. Drawing on approaches from visual ethnography, feminist scholarship and Indigenous methodologies, her work examines how clothing can act as a living archive, preserving stories that often sit beyond official histories and museum collections. Alongside her research, Nuraan leads Undergraduate and master's programmes that centres decolonial perspectives in fashion and design innovation, where she is committed to critically engaged learning environments that encourage students to question inherited systems and imagine alternative futures. Born in Cape Town and based in the UK, her work is shaped by diaspora, community and the enduring social life of cloth.

Studio Sway is a design studio with a strong focus on research through design. Although managed solely by its founder Shaakira Jassat. Shaakira was born and raised in South Africa and now lives in the Netherlands. Her previous profession in the architecture/interior field, together with her upbringing in a young democracy plays a role in informing her work. In her latest projects she focuses on ecological resources, architecture, food and society, following an intensive drought in Cape Town between 2015 and 2018. Shaakira secured a B.Sc. in Interior Architecture at the University of Pretoria – South Africa, and later moved abroad to further studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. She now lives and works in the Netherlands.